The Ghost Apple (15 page)

I do not attempt to hide the facts. My regime will be one of brutal frankness and I will not conceal even the most insignificant detail. On St. Renard this year, violence perpetrated by conspirators and anarchists has left ten wounded and one dead. Two houses have been completely destroyed by fire, three more have been damaged, and the Proxy College had to be evacuated after a gas leak thought to be the result of sabotage.

I supply these facts and figures in order to prove to our enemies that we do not deny the truth. We accept the truth, and we face these enemies with determination and hate in our hearts.

What of that fallen woman, our outgoing president, who accuses me of being the “mad architect” of the labor disputes on St. Renard?

It is said that this woman is the descendant of an aristocratic family and that she has a great deal of blue blood in her veins. In my veins, on the other hand, flows the pure and healthy blood of farriers and coopers and ironworkers, and at this moment I feel myself to be infinitely more cultivated and well mannered than this woman from whose mouth, fetid with alcohol and tobacco, comes forth such vile baseness.

But let me say no more about our Proxy College. Let me turn now to concerns of even greater moment.

Closer to home, the struggle is no less fiercely combated. I say to you now, in all frankness, that I do not believe there has ever been a crisis of such proportions as the present one, and we must make it plain that this crisis has to be faced, and faced not merely as a problem of funding and institutional policy, but as a spiritual and moral problem as well.

We must recognize this!

We have had gray days!

But think of the Punic Wars, when the Battle of Cannae threatened to crush Rome. At Zama, Rome destroyed Carthage and wiped it from geography and history forever.

Where Rome can wrest victory from the abyss of defeat, so too can Tripoli College.

But let me close this statement with a few words about Tripoli College in its spiritualized conception.

Tripoli is not only an academic institution. It is also the highest and most powerful form of personality. It is a force, but a spiritual force, which takes over all the forms of the moral and intellectual life of our young men and women. It is the form, the inner standard, and the discipline of the whole person; it saturates the will as well as the intelligence. Tripoli, in short, is not only a granter of degrees, but the educator and promoter of spiritual life. It wants to remake not the forms of human life, but its content: Man, Character, Faith.

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith. It is passion. It is not necessary that it should be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a hope, a faith—that it is courage. And to this myth, to this grandeur that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest. Thus I pledge myself to this cause.

 

Signed,

William Beckford

Recommendation Letter for Bill Dean

December
18
,
2009

Prof. Richard Carlyle

212
Dropsy Place

Tripoli, NH
03791

To Whom It May Concern,

I’m writing on behalf of Bill Dean, a student I’ve known for almost thirty years. He’d be a great addition to whatever program he’s applying for. Is it the Field Studies Program? He didn’t even bother to tell me! And did he mention that he’s actually the dean of students? His real name is William Brees. That’s just by way of saying that I have a personal relationship with him. I don’t mean that we have an improper relationship. I’ve never even been with a man! Not that I’m ruling it out. The first thing I tell my students each semester is NEVER RULE THAT OUT!

If he’d been in my poetry class, I’m sure Bill would have done great work. But maybe he’s not the kind of guy who goes in for literary art! At least I can be sure he’d have been a great addition to our classroom discussions, since he always does manage to keep the conversation going and make you feel at ease. He’s a great guy—that is to say, student. More important, of course, is that he’s gotten me out of some big-time serious no-joke TIGHT SPOTS in the twenty-eight years I’ve known him. There was this one time when I was up on the roof of Longman Hall with a potato gun! Another time I was living in one of the period rooms at the museum. I slept under the bed during the day. They have those fancy bed skirts, so it was no trouble keeping out of sight, and anyway the guards knew I was in there and they didn’t mind.

And a few years ago—this one will blow your hairpiece off—I sort of kidnapped a student!

Dean Brees is a good kid, or man. And I wouldn’t say that about just anyone! If I could be as steady as that, my God, you wouldn’t believe the things I could do. All the good he’s done for me, bailing me out of jail, etc., etc. It gives me the screaming meemies just to think about it, and then I feel the old familiar feeling, the high singing craziness, and off I go for another spree in toon town. If you end up accepting his application, TELL HIM I’M SORRY!

Best,

Richard Carlyle

First Proclamation of the Antillia Liberation Army / December 21, 2009

To the people of St. Renard

Brothers and Sisters:

We are the product of five hundred years of pain and horror and humiliation. For five hundred years we have lived and died at the pleasure of men hardly fit to lick the dirt from our bare feet. For five hundred years we have shed our blood so that other people, white people, can have cheap sugar, cheap clothes, cheap bananas, cheap drugs. For five hundred years we have been the uncomfortable fact, the other side of sweetness, the dark surprise in the basement of world history. We have been the men and women outside the gates.

And we are still here. We have lived at the crossroads of empire and in the slums of empire, and we have never moved from this spot. We came to these shores against our will, we came in misery, but we came, and after five hundred years this island is our only home. We mean to claim our rights as free citizens of the world.

What has been happening all this time? What do these five hundred years have to teach us?

We watched Columbus’s men rape and brutalize the indigenous population. And when the Indians were gone, when the Spaniards had moved west and south, compelled by their depraved passion for gold, we watched the British and the French tear each other to pieces for the right to these islands, the right to rape us and murder us and enslave our children.

We have watched fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles die for the sake of sugarcane, for the sake of a giant tropical grass. They died so that a woman in London could sweeten her tea.

Through the centuries we have watched the Europeans debarking from their filthy ships, setting up their houses and plantations, getting rich from the soil they fertilize with our blood. We have stumbled against them in the street and we have been beaten for it. We have seen them in the noonday heat, in their waistcoats and tails, arguing over the value of our flesh, buying us and selling us with the cattle and the hogs.

A traveler to the island two hundred years ago tells of a white child, the son of a sugar baron, who demanded an egg. Told that there were no eggs, the child said: “Then I want two.”

We have lived through abolition—that fragile hope—and the degrading years of apprenticeship, only to see slavery return in the guise of “Free Trade.”

We have cried out in pain as Marville Guajiro, the first democratically elected president of the free and sovereign nation of St. Renard, was ignominiously deposed, hog-tied, hauled from his bed by mercenaries in the employ of the Big Anna corporation and the government of the United States of America.

We have watched Big Anna creep like a rash over the skin of our island. We have watched our sisters and mothers work their hands to the bone in the factories of the St. Renard Free Zone. We have watched our fathers as they stumble up the road from the banana farms and the cane fields. We have seen the suppurating wounds on their arms. We have seen the yellow skin, the blue skin, the chemical burns. We have seen the hope go out of their eyes.

It has been the same everywhere. Globalization began with the conquest of the Canary Islands. It continued with the Spaniards on Hispaniola, the Spaniards in Mexico, the Spaniards in Peru. Year by year the horror was renewed. The slave port of Whydah, the Portuguese East Indies, the Dutch East Indies, the British Raj, the plantation complex in Brazil and Cuba and the U.S. South, indentured “coolie” labor, Chinese peasants kidnapped and enslaved on the guano islands off South America, King Leopold in the Congo, the brutalization of Australia and the Pacific islands, the Amazonian rubber trade, the Germans terrorizing Namibia, the Germans terrorizing Europe, interned Japanese in the beet fields of the United States, apartheid, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. Millions dead for gold, silver, sugar, cotton, rubber, ivory, oil. The same thing in all places at all times. The merciless exploitation of the multitude by those whom arbitrary circumstances have made strong.

And now we say: Enough, enough, enough.

We—men and women, whole and free—declare war on the United States, on Big Anna, on the forces of neoliberalism. We ask for your support in this plan to expel the murderers and the rapists from our island, to claim for our people all the rights that have been denied us for five centuries, the rights to education, health care, justice, food, land, peace.

Our fathers were coachmen and cane cutters on St. Renard, but their fathers were kings in Africa. We have been slaves but we will be slaves no longer.

Join the insurgent forces of the Antillia Liberation Army

Commandant Kabaka
,
December 2009

Winter Break

Special Promotional Feature Sponsored by the St. Renard Ministry of Tourism (www.gosr.com)
*

Winter Getting You Down? Tired of the Cold and the Dark? Visit the Tropical Paradise of St. Renard!

Imagine a place where fewer than 20 percent of visitors are mugged within three days. Imagine a place where hardly anyone reports yaws, piums, creeping eruption, white and black piedra, and chromomycosis. Imagine a place where the only tropical disease—besides typhoid, yellow fever, malaria, beriberi, filariasis, river blindness, and numerous unexplained fevers—is Relaxation. Imagine ST. RENARD. You won’t be able to look away.

* This message has been approved by, or is distributed with the cynical approval of, Big Anna® Brands.

About Us

Silky white sand, crystal-clear water, sizzling entertainment, inconceivable fruits, misty rain forests, beautiful locals, and all the white rum you can drink. Sound good? St. Renard is the island paradise you’ve been looking for all your life, a place literally throbbing and pulsing with a diverse and rich mingling of cultures and influences—France, England, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and a shot of Africa for color.

Originally home to a large native population of Carawak Indians, St. Renard was unknown to Europeans until the early sixteenth century, when it was discovered by Spanish conquistadors searching for El Dorado. Juan Hombre de Rosa claimed the island for Spain in 1511, and San Renard remained a Spanish possession until 1635, when it fell to a British expeditionary force under Captain Burroughs Hertfordshire, who rechristened the island St. Reynard. The British immediately traded the island to the Dutch, reportedly to settle a private debt, and the Dutch abandoned Sint Reinaert ten years later, when disease wiped out most of the early colonists. The island became a French colonial possession in the early eighteenth century and was sold shortly afterward to the Danes, who sold the island back to the Dutch, who resold the island to the French, who surrendered the island to the British after an afternoon of naval bombardment. St. Renard gained its independence from Great Britain in 1973, at which time—following an ill-starred attempt at self-government—the fledgling republic was obliged to sell itself to the United States (called, by Spanish-speaking Renardennes, “El Pulpo de Gran Maldad”), of which it is still an unincorporated insular possession.

This almost unbelievably rich and diverse cultural history makes St. Renard one of the most historic, diverse, and culturally rich places in the Caribbean. There’s literally something for everyone. Whether you’re into relaxation, sex tourism, snorkeling, gambling, psychoanalgesic tropical vegetation, or just eating and drinking as much as your body can tolerate, we’ve got you covered. And if none of those things appeal to you, don’t worry about it! We’ll find something that does. After all, your satisfaction is what keeps us out of the cane fields!

What to Do

If this is your first time on St. Renard, your first stop should be
Buzzard Point
, a bawdy shantytown abutting colonial San Cristobal. There you’ll find authentic thatch-roofed bars and gambling houses, colorful street vendors, and beautiful women. Enjoy a half pint of Renardenne white rum and make friends with locals who really know their island. You’ll pick up the basics of Plantation Creole in no time, and by morning you’ll feel like a Renardenne yourself.