{last night I read a description in a travel book on Mexican history called 'Yesterday's Train' by Terry Pindell, of the dungeons beneath the fortress on the island of San Juan de Ulua, off Veracruz.
" He shows us three dungeons, traditionally called "Purgatory," "Heaven," and "Hell," that were reserved for political prisoners. But for a tiny slit in the back stone wall of each, there is no light. Stalactites hang from the ceilings. Prisoners who would otherwise have been killed but whose live bodies somebody thought might come in handy someday, lived here in their own excrement on a rough stone floor. They were fed on garbage thrown in daily, and guards came to remove the dead once a month. The horrors of the place were so legendary that one of Venustiano Carranza's first acts on assuming power during the revolution in 1915 was to declare that no prisoners would be held here again for one hundred years."you have to be able to imagine the actual day to day of that, the idea of dead bodies with their fresh meat lying there...the accomodation, the acclimation, the rules of conduct the mad minds make, and then de-localize it. we have this in our past, our pasts, our ancestry, forms of it versions of it, that kind of suffering, intentional and otherwise, but it's most evil when it's intentional, like so many other forms of depravity.
so I'm carrying that around, meditating on it from this and that angle, and I read this thing about Barbra Streisand suing the 'environmentalists' who are photographing the coast of California. in 'Boing Boing'. so I commented on the situation as I perceived it. in 'Boing Boing'. you can see my comment there if you'd like to, and also the ensuing I believe three(3) other comments that followed my first(1st). it just occurred to me as I was shutting down the twenty or so tabs I had open in my dazzling Mozilla 1.4 browser, that that description of San Juan de Ulua couldn't have been more apt.}
