It took twenty years for the rest of the world to find out.
During those twenty years, while prestigious scientists in prestigious places followed false leads, yellow fever continued its deadly ways.
August 15. THE JEWEL AND THE CROWN
Winston Churchill proclaimed:
“It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi. this malignant subversive fanatic. The truth is that Gandhiism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him cats’ meat. We have no intention of casting away the most truly bright and precious jewel in the Crown of the King, which more than all our other Dominions and Dependencies constitutes the glory and strength of the British Empire.”
Fifteen years later, the jewel abandoned the crown. On this day in 1947, India won its independence.
The hard road to freedom began in 1930 when Mahatma Gandhi, skinny and half-naked, reached a beach on the Indian Ocean.
It was the salt march. They were only a few when the march began, but a multitude by the time they got there. Each of them picked up a pinch of salt from the beach and brought it to his mouth, and thus broke the British law that forbade Indians from consuming salt from their own country.
August 16. SUICIDE SEEDS
For about three hundred and sixty million years, plants have been producing fertile seeds that generate new plants and new seeds, and never have they ever charged anyone for the favor.
But in 1998 a patent gave its blessing to the company Delta and Pine to produce and sell sterile seeds, which meant new seeds had to be purchased for every planting. In the middle of August of the year 2006, Monsanto, blessed be thy name, bought out Delta and Pine and also its patent.
Thus Monsanto consolidated its universal power: sterile seeds, known as “suicide seeds” or “terminator seeds,” form part of a very lucrative line that also obliges farmers to buy herbicides, pesticides and other poisons from the genetically modified pharmacy.
At Easter in the year 2010, a few months after the earthquake, Haiti received a grand gift from Monsanto: sixty thousand bags of seed produced by the chemical industry. Farmers gathered to receive the offering, and they burned every sack in an immense bonfire.
August 17. DANGEROUS WOMAN
Mae West, sinning flesh, voracious vampiress, was born in 1893.
In 1927 she and her entire entourage went to jail for having put on stage at a Broadway theater an invitation to pleasure, subtly titled Sex.
When she finished serving time for her “crime of public obscenity,” she decided to move from Broadway to Hollywood, from stage to screen, believing that the kingdom of freedom was about to arrive.
But in 1930, to ward off government censorship, Hollywood invented its own certificate of moral correctness, which for thirty-eight years determined which movies could open and which could not.
The Hays Code sought to keep the movies free of nudity, suggestive dances, lustful kissing, adultery, homosexuality and other perversions that undermine the sanctity of marriage and family. Not even Tarzan’s films escaped unscathed and Betty Boop had to put on a long skirt. Naturally, Mae West kept getting into trouble.
August 18. THE NETWORK OF NETWORKS
Around this time in 1969, a group of scientists in the US armed forces started up a new project: they were going to create a network of networks to connect and coordinate military operations on a scale never before seen.
In the war to conquer heaven and earth, this invention, not yet called the Internet, turned into a victory for the United States against its rival power, still called the Soviet Union.
Paradoxically, with the passing of the years, this instrument of war has also served to amplify the voices of peace, which previously resounded like a wooden bell.
August 19. WAR ON THE CHESSBOARD
In 1575 the first important battle in the history of chess was fought.
The winner, Leonardo da Cutri, received a prize of a thousand ducats, an ermine cape and a letter of congratulations from King Philip II of Spain.
The loser, Ruy López de Segura, wrote the book that founded the art of black — white combat on the checkered field. In that work the author, a cleric, beatifically advised:
When you sit down to play, if it is a clear and sunny day, make sure the enemy has the sun in his face, because it will blind him. And if it is dark and you are playing with lamps, put the light on his right because it will bother his eyes and cast a shadow when he reaches his right hand over the board, so he will have a hard time seeing where he is moving the pieces.
August 20. HEAVEN’S WORKFORCE
In the Ecuadorian highlands stands the church of Licto.
This fortress of the faith was reconstructed using gigantic stones, as the twentieth century came into being.
Since slavery was long gone, or so said the law, free Indians took up the task: they carried the stones on their backs from a quarry several leagues distant, and several of them lost their lives walking those narrow paths alongside deep gorges.
The priests charged sinners in stones for their salvation. Every baptism was paid for with twenty, and a wedding cost twenty-five. Fifteen stones was the price of a burial. If the family did not deliver them, the deceased could not enter the cemetery; he was buried in “evil land” and from there went straight to hell.
August 21. THE DIVISION OF LABOR
At Stanford University in the United States psychologists carried out a revealing experiment on the relationship between man and function.
They recruited a few students, white, well-educated, well-behaved and in good physical and mental health.
The toss of a coin decided who would be the jailer and who the prisoner in a fictitious jail set up in the basement of a university building.
The prisoners, unarmed, were numbers without names. The jailers, names without numbers, carried nightsticks.
It seemed like a game, but from the very first day those playing the role of jailer began to enjoy its pleasures. Permission to use the toilet was given only after much begging, prisoners were obliged to sleep naked on the concrete floor, and those who protested paid for their insolence in punishment cells, deprived of food and water.
Blows, insults, humiliations: the experiment did not last long. No more than a week. On this day in 1971, it ended.
August 22. THE BEST WORKERS
The French priest Jean-Baptiste Labat recommended in one of his books published in 1742:
African ten-to-fifteen-year-olds are the best slaves to take to America. The advantage is you can educate them so that they’ll keep up the pace as best suits their masters. Children more easily forget their native countries and the vices that hold sway there, they become fond of their masters and they are less inclined to rebel than older blacks.
This pious missionary knew what he was talking about. On the French islands of the Caribbean, Père Labat performed baptisms, communions and confessions, and between masses kept an eye on his properties. He owned lands and slaves.
August 23. THE IMPOSSIBLE COUNTRY