Eduardo Galeano - Children of the Days - A Calendar of Human History

At noon on this day in 1925 the count was reading the newspaper in the lobby of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, when he was struck by one of those great ideas that could finance his appetites whenever he tired of playing poker.

He sold the Eiffel Tower.

He printed up paper and envelopes with the seal of city hall and an engineer crony helped him write technical reports that proved the tower was falling down due to irreparable errors in its construction.

The count visited potential clients, one by one, and invited them to purchase the thousands upon thousands of tons of steel for a song. Because it involved the most public symbol of the French nation, the deal had to be done in secret. Scandal was to be avoided at all cost. The sales took place in silence and with some urgency, since the tower could have collapsed at any moment.

In the year 2010 the war against Afghanistan divulged its raison d’être: the Pentagon revealed that the country had mineral resources worth more than a trillion dollars.

The Taliban were not among the resources named.

Rather gold, cobalt, copper, iron and above all lithium, an essential ingredient in cellular telephones and laptop computers.

Around this time in 2010 it came out that more and more US soldiers were committing suicide. It was nearly as common as death in combat.

The Pentagon promised to hire more mental health specialists, already the fastest-growing job classification in the armed forces.

The world is becoming an immense military base, and that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy? The soldiers killing themselves or the wars that oblige them to kill?

On this day in 1982 the Argentine dictatorship lost the war. Without even so much as a shaving nick, the generals, who had sworn to give their lives to recover the Falkland Islands long ago usurped by the British Empire, tamely surrendered.

Here is the military division of labor: these heroic rapists of handcuffed women, these brave torturers and baby-snatchers and pocketers of everything else they could steal, made patriotic speeches; and young recruits from the poorest provinces marched off to the slaughterhouse of those far-off southern islands, where they died from bullets or the cold.

Several Argentine generals were tried for deeds committed during the military dictatorship.

Silvina Parodi, a student accused of being a rabble-rousing troublemaker, was one of the many prisoners who disappeared forever.

Her best friend Cecilia testified in court on this day in the year 2008. She told of the agony she had suffered at the military base and admitted she had been the one who gave them Silvina’s name, when she could no longer stand the daily and nightly torture.

“It was me. I took the executioners to the house where Silvina was. I saw them shove her out the door, hit her with their rifle butts, kick her. I heard her scream.”

Outside the courtroom, someone came over and asked her in a low voice, “After all that, how did you manage to go on living?”

And she answered, in a voice even lower, “Who told you I’m alive?”

Oscar Liñeira was another of the thousands of young men disappeared in Argentina. In military lingo, he was “transferred.”

Piero Di Monte, imprisoned at the same base, heard his last words: “I’ve got something to tell you. You know something? I’ve never made love. Now they’re going to kill me and I never will.”

In 1782 the Quito municipal court ruled that Tomasa Surita had to pay the taxes on some cloth she had bought in Guayaquil.

Only males were legally authorized to buy or to sell, but she was still liable for the taxes.

“Let them collect it from my husband,” Tomasa said. “The law thinks we’re idiots. If we women are idiots about getting paid, then we’ll be idiots about paying too.”

The United States of America v. Susan B. Anthony , Northern District Court of New York, June 18, 1873.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY RICHARD CROWLEY: On the 5th of November, 1872, Miss Susan B. Anthony voted for a representative in the Congress of the United States. At that time she was a woman. I suppose there will be no question about that. She did not have a right to vote. She is guilty of violating a law.

JUDGE WARD HUNT: The prisoner has been tried according to the established forms of law.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY: Yes, your honor, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women.

JUDGE HUNT: The prisoner will stand up. The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution.

MISS ANTHONY: I shall never pay a dollar.

“I think bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” said Susan B. Anthony.

Her companion in the struggle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said, “Woman is riding to suffrage on a bicycle.”

Certain physicians, like Philippe Tissié, warned that the bicycle might provoke abortion and cause sterility, while their colleagues insisted that this indecent apparatus might lead to depravity because it gave women pleasure when they pressed their intimate parts against the seat.

The truth is the bicycle gave women mobility, allowed them to leave the house and enjoy a dangerous taste of freedom. And it was the bicycle that sent the pitiless corset, which impeded pedaling, out of the clothes closet and into the museum.

Her soprano voice lent color to every syllable and won ovations in Rio de Janeiro.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Joaquina Lapinha became the first singer from Brazil to conquer Europe.

Carl Ruders, a Swedish opera fan, heard her in the year 1800 in a theater in Lisbon. Enthused, he praised “her good voice, imposing figure and great dramatic sense.”

“Unfortunately, Joaquina has very dark skin,” Ruders warned, “but she remedies that shortcoming with cosmetics.”

Today’s soccer match in 2001 between Treviso and Genoa was a surprise.

One of Treviso’s players, the Nigerian Akeem Omolade, was often greeted in Italy’s stadiums with whistles and jeers and racist chants.

But today there was silence. The other ten Treviso players had all painted their faces black.

In the year 234 before Christ, a sage named Eratosthenes planted a rod at noon in the city of Alexandria and measured its shadow.

Exactly one year later, at the same time on the same day, he planted the same rod in the city of Aswan and it cast no shadow.

Eratosthenes deduced that the difference between shadow and no shadow proved the world was a sphere not a plate. Then he measured the distance between the two cities in steps, and with that information tried to calculate the size of the world’s waist.

He was fifty miles off.

At midnight tonight, big bonfires are lit.

Crowds gather around them.

This night will cleanse houses and souls. Old junk and old desires, things and feelings worn out by time, are tossed into the fire to make room for the new to be born.

From the north this custom spread all over the world. It was always a pagan holiday. Always, until the Roman Catholic Church decided tonight would be Saint John’s Eve.