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

In 1938 a big story broke: Standard Oil Company had found a sea of oil under the immense sands of Saudi Arabia.

Today that country is the world’s top producer of high-profile terrorists and of human rights violations. But the Western powers that so often invoke the Arab threat when they want to sow panic or justify dropping bombs get along famously with this kingdom of five thousand princes. Could it be because Saudi Arabia sells the most oil and buys the most weapons?

In 1953 a Luis Buñuel movie called Él opened in Mexico.

Buñuel, a Spanish exile, had filmed the novel of another Spanish exile, Mercedes Pinto, which told of the misery of married life.

It ran for a full three weeks on the marquee. Audiences laughed like it was a Cantinflas comedy.

The author of the novel had been booted out of Spain in 1923. She had committed the sacrilege of giving a talk at the University of Madrid with a title that made her intolerable: “Divorce as Good Hygiene.”

The dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera, had her hauled in. He spoke in the name of the Holy Mother Catholic Church, and in a few words he said it all: “Shut up or leave.”

Mercedes Pinto left.

From that point on her creative stride, which awakened the earth wherever she tread, left footprints in Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico.

Georgia O’Keeffe lived and painted for nearly a century and died still painting.

She raised a garden of paintings in the solitude of the desert.

Georgia’s flowers — clitoris, vulva, vagina, nipple, belly button — were chalices for a thanksgiving mass for the joy of having been born a woman.

In the year 1770, the English Parliament debated a law to punish wily women.

Perfidious females had been seducing His Majesty’s subjects and tricking them into matrimony using such evil arts as “scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes or bolstered hips.”

The authors of these frauds, the bill said, “shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and the like misdemeanours and the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void.”

Given the technological backwardness of the times, the bill failed to mention silicone, liposuction, Botox, plastic surgery and other medical and chemical innovations.

Today is International Women’s Day.

Over the millennia, thinkers human and divine, all of them male, have taken up the woman question:

Regarding their anatomy:

Aristotle: “Woman is an incomplete man.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Woman is the misbegotten product of some defect in the male seed.”

Martin Luther: “Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and wide hips, to keep house and bear and raise children.”

Regarding their nature:

Francisco de Quevedo: “Hens lay eggs and women lay men.”

Saint John of Damascus: “Woman is a sicked she-ass.”

Arthur Schopenhauer: “Woman is an animal with long hair and short sight.”

Regarding their fate:

Jehovah said to women, according to the Bible: “Thy husband shall rule over thee.”

Allah said to Mohammed, according to the Koran: “Righteous women are obedient.”

On this early morning in 1916, Pancho Villa crossed the border with his horsemen, set fire to the city of Columbus, killed several soldiers, nabbed a few horses and guns, and the following day was back in Mexico to tell the tale.

This lightning incursion is the only invasion the United States has suffered since its wars to break free from England.

In contrast, the United States has invaded practically every country in the entire world.

Since 1947 its Department of War has been called the Department of Defense, and its war budget the defense budget.

The names are an enigma as indecipherable as the Holy Trinity.

On this night in 1712, the Devil visited the young violinist Giuseppe Tartini and played for him in his dreams.

Giuseppe wanted the music to go on forever, but when he awoke it was gone.

In search of that lost music, Tartini composed two hundred and nineteen sonatas, which he played with fruitless mastery throughout his life.

The public applauded his failures.

In 1931 a baby named Rupert was born in Australia.

In a few short years Rupert Murdoch became lord and master of the media throughout the world.

His astonishing success came not only thanks to his astute command of the dirty deal. Rupert understood the inner workings of capitalism, secrets he learned as a twenty-something student, when he was an admirer of Lenin and a reader of Marx.

Mount Fuji, symbol of Japan, glows red.

The clouds filling the sky are red with plutonium, yellow with strontium, purple with cesium, all of them bearing cancer and other monstrosities.

Six nuclear plants have exploded.

People flee in desperation but there is nowhere to go. “They tricked us! They lied to us!”

Some throw themselves into the sea or the void, just to hurry fate along.

Akira Kurosawa dreamed this nightmare and filmed it twenty years before the apocalyptic nuclear catastrophe his country suffered at the beginning of 2011.

On this day in the year 2007, the banana company Chiquita Brands, successor to United Fruit, admitted to financing Colombian paramilitary gangs during seven years, and agreed to pay a fine.

The gangs offered protection against strikes and other untoward behavior by labor unions. One hundred and seventy-three union activists were murdered in the banana region during those years.

The fine was twenty-five million dollars. Not a single penny reached the families of the victims.

In 1883 a crowd gathered for Karl Marx’s funeral in a London cemetery — a crowd of eleven, counting the undertaker.

The most famous of his sayings became his epitaph: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

This prophet of global change spent his life fleeing the police and his creditors.

Regarding his masterwork, he said: “No one ever wrote so much about money while having so little. Capital will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.”

At dawn today in the year 44 BC, Calpurnia woke up in tears.

She had dreamed her husband had been stabbed and was dying in her arms.

Calpurnia told him the dream, and still sobbing pleaded with him to remain at home, for outside only his grave awaited.

The supreme ruler, dictator for life, divine warrior, undefeated god, could not pay heed to a woman’s dream.

Julius Caesar pushed her aside and walked toward the Roman Senate, to his death.

Around this day and others, festivals are held to celebrate people who tell tales out loud, writing in the air.

Storytellers have several divinities to inspire and support them.

One is Rafuema, the grandfather who recounted the origin of the Huitoto people in the Araracuara region of Colombia.