Limiting The Future

An Interview With David Ehrenfeld

Our new false god is the idea that we can order the future. It’s a secular messianic view of a world in which there will be no death, no sickness, no stupidity — a world we will have totally ordered by the force of our own intellects and technology.

The True, Original First World

We have got it backward in our conventional worldview. The world of indigenous peoples, like the Lacandones, is the real First World, because it has been here the longest; it was here first. The so-called First World of the industrialized North is first only in capital accumulation and military force.

Forgetting

On the nineteenth of April 1989, one of the huge gun turrets on the battleship Iowa blew up, killing the sailors who were manning it. Debate about responsibility for the explosion continued long afterward, but lost in the emotion of the tragedy was a curious aspect of the story.

Burying O’Ryan

I brought my shovels to the grave site and marked out a larger area. O’Ryan was a big dog, and I knew that a hole always gets smaller as you dig down.

Perry

Perry was just another scrubby desert town tucked behind a minor highway — to us it was a highway; to the state it was a tired dirt road that had been paved in an election year and forgotten.

Memory’s Tailor

“My name is Alexandr Davidowich Berman,” he wrote in the space above Lenin’s vest. “My mother’s name was Sophie. She knew Hebrew and gave me my first needle; we made a suit for a doll.

Crimson Tide

We’re standing in the drizzle — me and Uncle Oscar and Daddy and the chaplain and two soldiers who look like they’ve marched right out of the toy box. I half expect their feet to be welded to plastic platforms wedged into piles of sand.

So Familiar And Yet So Strange

First, there was the customer ahead of Simon in line disputing the price of a jumbo jar of sliced jalapeños. Then the senior who was low on cash and tried to pay on a credit card, invalidated three times.

Mostar Bridge — Bosnia, 1987

In-Law Ancestors

Oh-Oh