An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

sight of in that hazy green light, any competent researcher can find the octopi, say, or the many phyla of benthic worms which do seem to manage without, but we are given a clue, by virtue of the documented failures of arthropoda and cartilaginous fishes, that all is
not
well nonetheless. And indeed, on consideration we see that even an octopus (most marvelously developed eyes of any of the invertebrates, said my biology teacher, Dr. Mawby) often lives and hides in a nice hard little GROTTO or CORAL FORMATION somewhere. It follows from my presentation that we are (all of us, vegetables, protists and animals alike) members of a great fraternity of scavengers—that we are either patches of mold or ants crawling through the fissures of some immense decaying skull: a familiar central range of mountains, their contours almost memorized now after long nights of study in the desert, eyes aching over the textbook … a series of deep ravines and broken ridges, the lowest of which, especially toward the west, are naked in aspect because we have picked them clean … a dry, invigorating atmosphere, at least where we are, in our bone-ivory tower built some distance above that rather creepy-looking eye socket (please, God, don’t let
that
be on Dr. Mawby’s exam): in short, the Land of Counterpane.
    Sitting at my bleached college desk one summery evening, waiting to graduate on Sunday, I looked out the window, which was hung withwhite drapes, and could see only the night leaves (back-lit by streetlights) and the articulated branches from which they fanned like the skeleton of a hand. Everything was quiet, and I finally closed my eyes, sustained by the humidity that impinged on marine benthic organisms as currents bearing to eager gill slits the dissolved nutrients of rotting things in their richness—and that brushed, too, about the lonely corpse of that Russian cosmonaut, faintly crackling between the stars, as that scientifically undetectable but nonetheless palpable Ether that everybody had once believed in, and its swirlings made the frost sparkle now and then beneath his cracked and darkened helmet—what was his name?—as he circled round and round the deserts and poles of the world in a people’s soviet socialist tin can. —Had this really happened, or did it come from a science-fiction book I’d read? I didn’t even know that much.

Explanations [1]
     
    “I still don’t understand why you want to go to Afghanistan,” my father said. “I guess I’ll never understand it.”
    Actually it was very simple. I just wanted to comprehend what had happened there. Then I would put myself at someone’s service. I meant to be good, and was prepared to do good.
    In my notebook, on the page of questions to be answered, I wrote:
Is it possible that the invasion will be beneficial in the long run (increasing literacy through compulsory schooling, etc.)?
For it was and is my habit to take everything at face value first.
    Take religion, Lenin had said, or the denial of rights to women, or the oppression and inequality of the non-Russian nationalities … In our country they have been settled completely by the legislation of the October Revolution. We have fought and are fighting religion in earnest. We have granted
all
the non-Russian nationalities
their own
republics or autonomous regions. We in Russiano longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism, which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie …
     
    I had never been to the Soviet Union, although I had always wanted to see Tashkent with its fountains and roses, Gorki, Leningrad, Western Siberia (“the land is fabulously rich in reindeer and luxurious furs”)… So it was possible that face value was honest value, that this multinational republic had succeeded in ending starvation, in making books available to all, in giving women a fairer chance (
we
could not