The Persistent Desire to Be Free
 |
| Plaza outside Franz Kafka Museum. Prague 2013. |
My name does not matter. I have practiced law for many years in the capital city of my home country, which shall remain nameless. The name that matters is Somotomo. Anton Somotomo.
Somotomo lives quietly in one of the capital city's older suburbs, quite close to the city center, where I live and work. It is about a twenty minute tram ride for me, when I visit him. The street in front of his house is paved with bluestone and lined with trees. There are bicycles and children.
Somotomo was, and I suppose is, the leader of the country's political opposition. In his day he was quite a firebrand and had a large following, but the government persistently whittled away at the movement. Many people left the country, others went to jail - Somotomo himself spent a great deal of time in jail, although I always managed eventually to get him out. Others fell silent, and not a few simply disappeared.
The ruling clique eventually established very strong control throughout the country, although they were thoughtful enough to allow people like me to continue working, albeit in a much diminished capacity. I think they found it useful to maintain a charade of law, even though their only true interest was order. And power. And wealth. And women.
And, for quite a few years, it appeared that their control was complete.
Then, one morning, something happened. The country's president, whose authority was absolute, had sex with his wife. This was a somewhat unusual occurrence, because the president normally had sex with women other than his wife. Even at his advanced age, he continued, with the help of modern medicine, to have sex with two or three different women a day. He had several long-term mistresses, but one of the main tasks of his secret service was to scour the countryside for pretty young women. They managed to produce a new one every two or three days, and the president particularly enjoyed them.
At any rate, having sex with his wife had become an increasingly rare occurrence. On this particular morning, when he had finished, and was walking to the bathroom, his wife noticed something. Written in black ink on the president's buttocks were a series of letters. She put on her glasses and squinted a bit. Then she thought things over. When her husband reappeared and started to dress, she said, "Dear, it appears that something is written on your buttocks."
Her husband looked at her with his usual mild contempt. He said, "What are you talking about?"
She got out of bed and picked up a hand mirror. "Here. Take this. Go stand with your back to the tall mirror on the wall, and use this mirror to look at your backside."
The president did as he was told, fumbling a bit. He needed to find his glasses, and then he had trouble using the hand mirror, but eventually he got there. He exploded with rage. He was quite good at exploding with rage - he usually managed several tantrums a day, sometimes about picayune things, just to keep in practice.
"How did that man's name get on my backside?" The letters on his buttocks were S-o-m-o-t-o-m-o.
"How would I know, dear?" Then his wife made a mistake. She said, "Perhaps one of your girlfriends put them there."
The president walked to his bedside table, picked up his phone, and called the head of the secret police. The head of the secret police picked up instantly. He had been amusing himself by listening to the president have sex with his wife, but he didn't have video of the presidential bedroom, so he wasn't quite sure what was going on.
"Good morning, sir. What can I do for you?"
"One of your wenches has written the name of Somotomo across my buttocks!"
The police chief thought for a brief moment, then said, "Have you tried washing it off?"
"That's not the point, you idiot! Someone was bold enough to do this. You must find that person immediately and inflict great punishment!"
"Yessir. If soap and water doesn't work, you might want to try a solvent for ink or paint. Be careful, though. You don't want to hurt yourself. Perhaps call your doctor."
"Shut up and go do your job, idiot! I expect a report this evening."
And so the entire secret police department dropped everything and started trying to find the girlfriend who had desecrated the president's buttocks. (All other possibilities were ignored.) Files were pulled for the previous six months, case officers were mobilized. (Each of the president's girlfriends had a case officer whose case load was generally in three figures.) Women were summoned to headquarters. Those who didn't respond soon had a knock on the door and a free ride downtown.
And the president tried to wash off the offending letters with soap and water, without effect. His wife suspected an indelible marker, but kept her mouth shut. A doctor was called. He diagnosed a very persistent indelible ink and suggested a tincture of time. The natural exfoliation of the skin would eliminate the problem - unlike a tattoo.
As it turned out, the marks on the president's buttocks acted more like a tattoo than anything else. But the National Forensic Laboratory was never able to figure out what kind of marker was used. When the current regime had come in, virtually all of the scientists capable of dealing with these questions had left the country. The regime installed as head of the National Forensic Laboratory a distant relative of the president who had previously pursued a career as a dairy farmer until his unpasteurized milk sickened several hundred people (most of whom lived).
The interrogations of the president's many girlfriends were not terribly productive. Most of them said they had seen nothing. A few admitted seeing something - several suspected that the president was not very good at cleaning himself - but none recalled what the writing had actually said. And certainly none of them confessed to writing on the president's rear end. Many confessed, however, that they certainly had had the opportunity.
The president, not a young man, often fell into a deep sleep, with snoring, shortly after he consummated his act. Sometimes he would fall asleep on top of his partner. His regular mistresses were accustomed to this, and had discovered they could maneuver themselves out of his embrace without awakening him and get on with their day. The young conscripts from the countryside often found themselves lying underneath the president for extended periods, and only escaped his embrace when he awoke and grumpily told them to go away.
The secret police chief was in a quandary. He had many suspects, virtually all of them had open opportunity. But what about motive? What about means?
As he often did with a difficult case - one that had the possibility of causing his career to come to a sudden end - he found himself chatting with his wife. He explained the case to her, hoping she might, as she had in the past, provide him with the spark of an idea.
His wife listened patiently and then said, "Dear, I gather you don't know this, but you also have Somotomo's name on your rear end."
It eventually turned out that the top three layers of the country's nomenklatura, including the president of the national bank and the presidents of the country's three national oil companies, were all sporting the Somotomo, in indelible ink, on their buttocks. This was a total of 1,837 men - there were no women in these ranks of the nomenklatura.
There were variations in the rendering of Somotomo. Sometimes it was written backwards, sometimes as a mirror image, sometimes as two eyebrows, one on top of each buttock. Sometimes it was SomotomO. And so forth. None of this information seemed to advance the investigation.
While he was making these discoveries, the secret police chief continued to try to find out which of the president's girlfriends was the culprit. Women were recalled for more intensive interrogations, which continued to be unproductive. The president was not happy with the progress of the investigation, and eventually the head of the secret police authorized torture.
The torture was also unproductive. Several suspects freely confessed to basically anything their interrogators suggested to them. A few were more committed to the truth and suffered greatly. One of them actually died.
It turned out that the girl who died was illiterate - a peasant girl from a poor agricultural district. She was unable even to write her own name, and so was an unlikely suspect for the crime of writing Somotomo on the president's derriere. As she was dying, and her chief torturer was leaning over her to hear her last gasping words, she did manage to spit him in the eye.
I had been hearing many rumors about all this - my contacts with the government were extensive, and the rumor mill was having a field day with the president's rear end. I had a mild concern that the government might decide to throw my client - Anton Somotomo - back into jail for some specious reason, or no reason at all, but this did not happen.
Instead, one morning I got a call from the country's chief prosecutor. He was more than usually polite, and our introductory pleasantries lasted longer than usual, but eventually he did get to the point. He was hopeful that I would be willing to talk with Anton Somotomo and to determine what, if anything, he knew about the Somotomo derrieres. And, if possible, to ask if there was some discreet way for Somotomo to convince the women with the indelible markers to stop. The chief prosecutor emphasized that he was not interested in receiving reports, or getting lists of suspects, or anything like that. He was just hoping that Somotomo would be able to get them to stop.
Both Somotomo and I were already under virtually continuous surveillance, so I knew that anything we said or did would soon wind up on the desks of the secret police chief and the chief prosecutor, with any good bits extracted from the raw reports and forwarded to the president.
I thought there was a significant downside to noncompliance - the regime could always toss both of us in jail for an indeterminate period, with no charges. The regime had actually been quite fond of throwing lawyers in jail, until it became apparent that the lawyers were organizing little law schools in jail, teaching the other prisoners how to annoy their persecutors. I myself had been lucky, and only had to visit jails, not live in them.
On the other hand, there didn't seem to be any great downside to doing what was asked. If Somotomo had any contact with what appeared to be an underground organization, the authorities would already know about it and be in the process of torturing his various contacts. I was pretty certain that I was being asked to drill a dry well, one which the chief prosecutor and the head of the secret police also knew to be a dry well. But it would allow them to report to the president that they had indeed possessed the imagination to pursue the matter without the president having to tell them to do it.
So I agreed. I telephoned Somotomo to ask for a meeting, and that afternoon found myself on a tram heading to his house in the suburbs.
I hadn't seen Somotomo for some time. When he opened his door, though, he seemed just the same, and was smiling his wry smile. We chatted in his living room, aware that everything we said was being recorded and transcribed. In addition to being a politician, Anton was a very literate man. He mentioned the old Greek play Lysistrata, suggesting that the victims of the current plot were getting off easy. We both could easily imagine the recorders and transcribers frantically searching the internet for a clue of what we were talking about.
I came to the point and asked Anton if there were any way he could help in making this problem go away. He smiled again.
"Briefly," he said, "no. I'm afraid that I'm so thoroughly surveilled that any dissident would have to be insane even to say hello to me in the street." He thought for a minute. "I do, however, know our people very well. Much better than our masters, who think they know the people but have never actually spoken with them."
That remark would surely not make it to the president's desk. Anton continued. "The people have a code of silence. It is how they have survived the last thousand years of brutal monarchs, sadistic inquisitors, rapacious invaders, and vicious but clueless dictators."
I could almost hear the fellow reviewing the transcript hit the delete button.
"I am certain that the code of silence will cause every investigation to end at a brick wall."
"I don't know why I'm offering advice to the evil munchkins, but they need to deep-six this. Make sure the affected men don't drop their trousers in public. And nobody, nobody should talk about it. They know how to do this. They've done it before.
"Actually," he continued, "the last thing they want is to find a perpetrator and hold a show trial. That would make the whole story immortal."
Our conversation turned to books we had been reading. Anton offered me tea and some lovely pastries. And then we parted. It turned out to be the last time I saw him.
The president, the chief prosector, and the secret service chief all did their best to follow the orders that Somotomo had given them. It didn't work. The secret police had followed their training in crime scene investigation and made the mistake of photographing the adorned buttocks of all 1,837 members of the senior nomenklatura - they were not so foolhardy as to broach the subject with the president, but it later turned out that his wife had taken a picture with her phone. Pretty soon all 1,838 photographs were on the internet, where they dominated the world of electrons for the next six months. A famous artist selected fifty of the most interesting photographs and created a collage. The collage and the original photos, with identifying information, became a show at a London gallery and then traveled the world for five years.
And that was only the tip of the iceberg. The pictures were everywhere. A member of the senior nomenklatura would go out for dinner at a three-star restaurant, and when he unfolded his napkin, there would be a small picture of his butt saying Somotomo. It went on for years.
During this time I died, but since this is a story I will tell you a few more chapters. There is no ending.
It would be nice if all this ridicule had caused a revolution, but it didn't. The president lived on, becoming increasingly senile. As the government, lacking its center, slowly ground to a halt, a neighboring country invaded, annexed all the territory, and killed the president and the entire 1,837 members of the top three ranks of the nomenklatura.
Somotomo lived on for a few more years and then passed away peacefully. There was a moderately large private funeral, attended mainly by women. The new owners of the country didn't understand Somotomo's role in the former state, so they did not perceive the funeral as a threat, and they ignored the continuous flowers on Somotomo's grave.
After a while, an event in a far-away place had a dramatic effect on the land of Somotomo. The emperor of the conquering army, who was very old, died. He had three sons, and each one wanted to be the new emperor. This disagreement quickly turned into what historians call a war for the succession, which we might call a three-way civil war.
One morning, the residents of the land of Somotomo awoke to a surprise. During the night, all the foreigners had quietly departed. One of the soldiers left a note for his girlfriend, explaining that they had all been called back to the empire's capital city, to help out with the civil war.
Over breakfast, and then in the streets, the people all gathered to discuss this strange turn of events. People had a great deal of difficulty dealing with the idea that, after so many years, they were no longer under the yoke of tyranny.
In the late morning, something else happened. The Underground surfaced. A leader with the nom de guerre of Camilla - the women of this country had always been allowed to go to school, and many of them were well grounded in the classics - came to the city's main square, accompanied by several hundred other women, who called themselves the Amazons. Camilla had brought with her a six-foot folding ladder, carried by her chief of operations, who had taken the more modern name of Xena.
Camilla climbed the ladder and addressed the crowd, which became quiet and followed her words carefully.
She declared a provisional government, with herself as the head. She announced elections in three months, with all adult citizens allowed to vote. This new constituent assembly would write a constitution, to be ratified by a vote of all the people. After that vote, the provisional government would hand power to the new constitutional government.
It all sounded a little complicated and boring. The people loved it. Instead of going home for lunch, they decided to stay in the square. Enterprising restaurateurs soon set up trestle tables and produced massive quantities of the people's favorite foods.
The party lasted three days, and then the people got to work.
I will end my story here, but obviously the story does not end here.
Oh, one last thing. The country got a new name: Somotomo.
 |
| Who needs elevators? Prague 2013. |
See also Elon Musk Is a Martian, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office, And So the Worm Turned, Little Karl.
A Personal Note on the Relevance of History
In my opinion, American exceptionalism has been a double-barreled weapon: It has distorted our own history, and it has led us, as a people, to neglect the relevant history of other countries. This has allowed American fascists to deny that they are about to do what they have long planned to do.
The historical record is plain, which is why the fascists do everything they can to divert you from reading the relevant books. I encourage you, especially if you work for a newspaper or a television station, to do your homework. And yes, this means reading books. Steal back one hour a day from your rather intense dalliance with social media, and read a book. You especially need to do this because your bosses are incorrigible. Either they think they will do well in fascism - they can point to Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat - or they will be happily gulled every time. The naivete of the bosses never ceases to amaze me. If you are properly armed, you may be able to divert them away from following their worst instincts, at least in some cases. - wkw
