Mirrors (79 page)

Life
photographer John Dominis captures the scene. Those raised fists, symbols of the Black Panther Party, denounce before the entire world racial bigotry in the United States.

Tommie and John are immediately expelled from the Olympic Village. Never again will they be allowed to take part in any sports competition. Race horses, fighting cocks, and human athletes have no right to spoil the party.

Tommie’s wife divorces him. John’s wife commits suicide.

Back home, no one will hire these troublemakers. John gets by as best he can, and Tommie, who holds eleven world records, washes cars for tips.

ALI

He was butterfly and bee. In the ring, he floated and stung.

In 1967, Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, refused to put on a uniform.

“Got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said. “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.”

They called him a traitor. They sentenced him to a five-year jail term, and barred him from boxing. They stripped him of his title as champion of the world.

The punishment became his trophy. By taking away his crown, they anointed him king.

Years later, a few college students asked him to recite something. And for them he improvised the shortest poem in world literature:

“Me, we.”

THE GARDENER

At the end of 1967, in a hospital in South Africa, Christian Barnard carried out the first human heart transplant and became the most famous doctor in the world.

In one of the pictures sent around the world, a black man appears among his assistants. The head of the hospital explained that he had snuck in.

At the time, Hamilton Naki lived in a hut without electricity or running water. He had no degree, but he was Dr. Barnard’s right-hand man. He worked by his side in secret. Law or custom forbade a black man from touching the flesh or blood of whites.

Shortly before he died, Barnard admitted:

“He probably had more technical skill than I had.”

In the final analysis, Barnard’s achievement would not have been possible without the man of magic fingers who had rehearsed the heart transplant several times with pigs and dogs.

On the hospital payroll, Hamilton Naki was listed as a gardener.

He retired on a gardener’s pension.

THE NINTH

Deafness kept Beethoven from ever hearing a note of his Ninth Symphony, and death kept him from learning of his masterpiece’s adventures and misadventures.

Bismarck proclaimed the Ninth an inspiration for the German race, Bakunin heard it as the music of anarchy, Engels declared it would become the hymn of humanity, and Lenin thought it more revolutionary than “The Internationale.”

Von Karajan conducted it for the Nazis, and years later he used it to consecrate the unity of free Europe.

The Ninth accompanied Japanese kamikazes who died for their emperor, as well as the soldiers who gave their lives fighting against all empires.

It was sung by those resisting the German blitzkrieg, and hummed by Hitler himself, who in a rare attack of modesty said that Beethoven was the true führer.

Paul Robeson sang it against racism, and the racists of South Africa used it as the soundtrack for apartheid propaganda.

To the strains of the Ninth, the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.

To the strains of the Ninth, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

WALLS

The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From morning till night we read, saw, heard: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain . . .

In the end, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them.

Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.

Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be fifteen times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is sixty times the length of the Berlin Wall.

Why are some walls so loud and others mute?

PHOTOGRAPH: THE WALL FALLS

Berlin, November 1989. Ferdinando Scianna photographs a man pushing a wheelbarrow. It holds, just barely, an enormous bust of Stalin. The bronze head was liberated from its body when a furious people armed with sledgehammers brought down the wall that had divided Berlin in two.

The wall is not all that falls. With it crumbles the regimes that started out proclaiming the dictatorship of the proletariat and ended up running the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. And with it falls political ideology reduced to religious faith, and parties that invoked Marx but acted like churches inspired by the old dictum of Pope Gregory VII: “The Roman Church has never erred, nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness.”

Without shedding a tear or a single drop of blood, Eastern Europeans watch the death throes of the powers that acted in their name.

Meanwhile in China, Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping launches the slogan “To grow rich is glorious.” And to enrich her glorious leaders, China offers the world market her millions of cheap and very obedient workers, and her air, land, and water, a natural bounty all too willing to immolate itself on the altars of success.

Communist bureaucrats become businessmen. That must be why they studied
Das Kapital
: to live off the dividends.

DIVINE LIGHT,MURDEROUS LIGHT

The flames crackle.

On the pyre burn discarded mattresses, discarded easy chairs, discarded tires.

A discarded god also burns: the fire blackens the body of Pol Pot.

At the end of 1998, the man who killed with such abandon died at home, in his bed.

No plague had ever so reduced the population of Cambodia. Invoking the sacred names of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, Pol Pot erected a colossal slaughterhouse. To save time and money, every charge came complete with sentence, and every jail had a door to a common grave. The entire country was a great burial mound and a temple to Pol Pot, who purified society to make it worthy of him.

Revolutionary purity demanded liquidating the impure.

The impure: those who thought, those who dissented, those who doubted, those who disobeyed.

CRIME PAYS

At the end of his many years in power, General Suharto could not keep track of either his victims or his money.

He began his career in 1965 by exterminating Indonesia’s Communists. How many, no one knows. Not less than half a million, perhaps more than a million. Once the military gave the green light to kill, anyone with a cow or a few chickens coveted by the neighbors suddenly became a Communist worthy of the noose.

U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green conveyed his government’s “sympathy and admiration for what the army is doing.”
Time
reported that dead bodies impeded navigation on the rivers, but went on to celebrate the events as “the best news for years.”

A few decades later, the same magazine revealed that General Suharto had “a tender heart.” By then, he had lost count of the many dead, and was about to turn the gardens of Timor Island into cemeteries.