It really bothers me that Google has decided that I must speak English, so all the search results I get, at least for the few pages, when I search for phrases that are likely to have more abundant Spanish-language results, are in English. Clemente Rodríguez is a player with my home team, Estudiantes de La Plata. You know that the information about him in Spanish must be many times greater than that in English – but just try searching for his name, all that appears is in English. Note that I’ve never set up my google account to be “English only” or anything of the sort.
I wonder how much information I’m not finding through Google due to this stupid bias towards English-language stuff. Lord, I wish there was a better search engine out there!
Category: Opinions (Page 5 of 11)
I was thinking about Juana Azurduy today – the lyrics of Mercedes Sosa’s song often run through my mind. And as compelling (or catchy) as the song lyrics are, Juana’s story is even more so. She was a mestizo woman from the Alto Perú (currently Bolivia) region of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (currently Argentina). She rebelled against being a nun, was committed to the ideals of popular rights and freedom, and married a like-minded man. Together, they raised an army and battled the Spaniards using guerrilla-like tactics. She continued fighting even after her husband was killed in battle and she was injured, she through pregnancies and births – for over fifteen years. She received the official title of Lieutenant Colonel and later was named commander of the Northern Army. At one point she had over 6,000 troops under her command – waging a guerrilla style war against the Spaniards.
Her end was like that of other revolutionary heroes – not exile this time, but being set aside and left to die in poverty. She was only rescued from the pages of history a hundred years later, I’m not sure to what degree by Mercedes Sosa‘s beautiful song. Today, of course, she is recognized along the other heroes of the independence war in Argentina and Bolivia.
I learned Juana’s story and song when I was in elementary school in Argentina. The song really stuck with me, even thirty years later I remember many of the lyrics (press on “continue reading” below for the lyrics in English and Spanish). Part of me is surprised that I actually learned the story and song in school, given that our military government couldn’t have been too fond of any vindication of guerrilla warfare or anything associated with Mercedes Sosa. Still, the Argentine military did venerate all things martial, and specially those associated with the revolutionary war (after all, that has been the only war the Argentine military has fought /and/ won – if we don’t count the Conquest of the Desert, whereas the Argentine military conquered Patagonia by exterminating most of the Mapuche population) – so I guess they figured they might at least throw the girls a bone and tell them about Juana.
And Juana’s story is one that I want to tell my daughters. It’s one that inspires me and one that I imagine has inspired many other revolutionary women in Argentina. I want my little girls growing up knowing that women, as much as men, were responsible for the social changes that brought us freedoms and rights (which is also why I will tell them about Eva Perón, even though I was raised a radical and still cannot shake my bone set antipathy against her :-), and that it will be up to them to continue the struggle for rights and freedoms.
As I was thinking about Juana, it occurred to me that I couldn’t think of one female hero of the American revolution. The only one Mike could come up with was Betsy Ross (the woman who sew the first American flag). There must be other, more real ones – but they seem to be lost in darkness. And I wonder if having Betsy Ross as the “woman” of the American revolution does not do more harm than good – does it imply that the only way women can help revolutionary movements is through domestic pursuits? Do we only have men to thank for the freedoms and rights we enjoy in America? At least in Europe you have women throwing salons and contributing to the spreading of the enlightment, on which not only the French Revolution but the independent movements in all of the Americas are based. And you have women /directly/ participating in the war efforts in WWI and WWII (including in the French and Italian resistance movements – I’ll write about one such woman later). But where are the revolutionary women in America?
I’m not sure what is the chicken and what is the egg, but this led me to think about just how terribly sexist American society is. And I mean sexism in the sense of people believing that women are actually intellectually and/or ethically inferior to men – not /different/, I think women and men are different, but ultimately less. It’s not the sort of thing that you can pinpoint easily, but if you lived in other countries, you’d know what I’m talking about. For example, why is it that twice as many girls in the Arab world chose to become engineers as in America? Why is the idea of having a female president still so revolutionary in the US, when there have been women presidents in South Asia, Europe and Latin America for decades? But even those are just symptoms – what I’m talking about is something much more ethereal, something that you can actually feel and that my daughters will have to grow up to counter.
Below is the video of Sosa singing and the the words of the Juana Azurduy song, my free translation in English and the real ones.
A big deal was made during the last presidential campaign about Obama’s tenuous connection to a former member of the terrorist organization “Weather Undergound”. William Ayers, the man in question, is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and he served in some education board with Obama. He also contributed to his campaign. Somehow this suggested to the Republicans that Obama was a friend of terrorists, purportedly unfit for the presidency.
You would then think, that there should have been more Republican uproar at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Uruguay, to attend the presidential inauguration of José Mujica. Mujica was an important Tupamaro leader during the early 70’s, spent 14 years in prison, and then pursued a less violent political career. The Tupamaros were the main “revolutionary” group in Uruguay, responsible for a number of kidnappings and killings.
As if that was not enough, Hillary continued on to Buenos Aires, where she met with Argentine president Cristina Fernández, herself a former Montonera. The Montoneros were Argentina’s main subversive organization during the 1970’s. And if that wasn’t enough, Hillary went on to Chile, where she met with former Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez member and current Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.
Hmmm. Perhaps being associated with a former “terrorist” is not a big deal outside of a campaign.
As anyone who knows me knows, I’m a die-heart atheist. I was *very* religious as a child (I grew up as a Methodist, but my faith was actually based on the biblical stories I read), but eventually I realized that I could not be a thinking person and have blind faith at the same time. When I started questioning my faith, I could not reconcile the fact that it was too much of a coincidence that I would have been born to the one “true” religion. Had I been born in Saudi Arabia, I would be a Muslim, had it been India, I would have been a Hindu, and if those religions were not “true”, what was to say that Christianity was? Then there was the factor of the Old Testament. For years, I had been very interested in ancient civilizations, to the point that I had decided to become an archaeologist when I “grew up”. Ironically, that interest have been sparked by my reading of the Old Testament. But when I started reading on Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations, I could not but notice that many of their creation myths were *very* similar to those of the Bible. Abraham, the founder of the Jewish faith, had himself come from Ur, a Mesopotamian city. It made sense that he had brought those creation stories with him, and that that’s how they made their way to the Bible. BUT, the myths were similar, but not identical. Given that Sumerian civilization preceded Jewish civilization, Sumerian myths were older and therefore had to be closer to the “truth”. And yet, when I read them I was reading them as myths and not as “history” – the way I was reading the Bible. This was only a problem because I had always taken the Bible literally, believed not just in the essence of the “message” but in the accuracy of its historical accounts. As I delved more into ancient history, it became clearer and clearer than the biblical accounts were inconsistent with archaeological and historical evidence and were, therefore, false. So the seeds of doubt were there.
During my freshman year in college, I was first exposed and first learned about the “scientific method”, at the same time than I was learning about evolution. The scientific method made absolutely sense to me – in particular the very simple and elemental notion that a theory needed to have evidence to back it up. What was the evidence that there was a god? Human life? But that could be and to me was convincingly accounted by the theory of evolution.
Richard Dawkins is considered nowadays one of the biggest atheist thinkers because of his book The God Delusion
I read the Selfish Gene in my Anthropology 1 class my freshman year in college. The class was taught by Vincent Sarich, one of the discoverers of the molecular clock. Vince (as I came to call him) was, at the time, the most intelligent man I had ever met and among the most inquisitive. He was also a terrific teacher and a man not unwilling to challenge PC notions and let science guide him where it did. Twenty two years after that Anthro class in Berkeley, I can still say he was one of the two most important influences in my life (the other one is probably my friend and co-worker Gregorio Dionis, the architect of the criminal procedures in Spain against Pinochet, and the other most intelligent man I’ve ever met). Vince did not only introduce me to the scientific method and the theory of evolution by natural selection (which is really the crux of the theory), but he also introduced me to the concept of parsimony, the concept that the simplest explanation, the one that would take the least steps, was the most likely to be true. That also made a lot of sense to me. Even if I needed to postulate a god as the ultimate creator of the universe, the question was, how did god came into being? I ended up at the same place, not knowing, so I might as well reject the concept for which there was no evidence, god.
So I did, and by the end of my freshman year in college, I’d become an atheist. I haven’t looked back since.
For many years, I found people’s belief in God to be quaint and perhaps necessary for their emotional health. It’s hard to give up on the idea that we are alone, purposeless, and that when we die, we die. And as Marx said, “religion is the opium of the masses”. But in recent years, I’ve become offended by the notion of the Christian god. Offended because that god, said by Christians to be omnipotent, would be, if real, so cruel and even “evil”, that, in my mind, worshiping him, much less wanting to be like him, is in itself an evil act. This is a god, after all, who stands by while he sees babies being raped to deathby some crazy notion that sex with them will cure AIDS (a disease, btw, that has not only disseminated African populations, but has left millions of orphans who now live in squalor and hunger). A god that allows genocides to be committed, torture to go on, children to be turned into drug-mad soldiers, millions to die of hunger and disease. And yes, a god that sent (or at least allowed) a devastating earthquake to one of the poorest and most miserable countries in the world. Why would a god do that?
If you talk to christians, they will tell you that people do horrible things because god gives them a “choice” (but what choice do those babies have to be raped?). That doesn’t explain earthquakes, however. It doesn’t explain why children, little children who have not had a chance to live, and therefore sin, need to die through painful deaths. It doesn’t explain why millions of children worldwide are not given a chance to be loved and fed, why they are turned into monsters or killing machines.
How could a god that cruel invite worshiping? How could anyone worship that god and keep their integrity?
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