DISAPPEARING
FROM HISTORY
In the last months of my career as a full-time teacher in
1998/99 in Western Australia and the first months of my sea-change and
retirement in Tasmania at the age of 55, Augusto Pinochet was back in the
news. I had first come across his name
and his activity in Chile while teaching high school in Whyalla South Australia
in September 1973, the very month I was hired for a position as senior tutor in
human relations at the then Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. On both these occasions, in the 1970s and at
the turn of the millennium, I was so
occupied with my 60 hours a week job as a high school teacher and senior tutor
and then 25 years later as a post-secondary teacher as well as my role in the
Baha’i community--another people-centred activity--that I did not really
appreciate the details of the story connected with this Chilean dictator’s role
in politics and contemporary history.
I won’t go into the details of Pinochet’s political
role and his personal, military and notorious history in this prose-poem.
Readers can easily find that out on the internet or in books should they be
interested in the topic. But on
watching the doco-drama, telemovie, Pinochet in Suburbia1
last night and on reading some background on his life and on the history of
Chile, I came to form a considered
opinion—not so much about Pinochet the man as about the importance of
international law in the modern world.-Ron Price with thanks to 1SBS
TV, “Pinochet in Suburbia,” 11:55-1:30 p.m. 6 June to 7 June 2010.
My world was a hot, intense landscape
in a dry-dog-biscuit of a town far down
at the bottom-end of the world where I
had come as a young man so long ago--
when I heard the name Pinochet---“was
he an Indian?” I thought to myself trying
as I was to survive after falling in holes in
my young adult-life…..I fell in a few more
before I heard that name in the closing years
of the mirabile dictu incredible century.
He’d
been a busy man as I had been a busy man in
those years from 1973 to 1999 and he was a
busy man again in suburbia in the UK1 before
he disappeared from history bit by bit2
while I,
too, was disappearing from history, taking up
a life in cyberspace much safer and protected
from the slings--arrows of outrageous fortune.
1 Pinochet
was placed under house arrest in Britain and was at the centre of a judicial
and public relations battle, the latter run by Thatcherite political operative
Patrick Robertson. He was eventually
released in March 2000 on medical grounds by the Home Secretary Jack Straw
without facing trial. Pinochet returned
to Chile on 3 March 2000. The TV
program, the telemovie, I watched tonight was centred on this house arrest.
2 On 25
November 2006, after I had given away all PT and casual-volunteer teaching and
installed myself as a FT writer, editor and publisher with no name, no fame and
no pay-cheque, Pinochet marked his 91st birthday by having his wife read a
statement written by him. Read to his
admirers it stated in part: "I assume the political responsibility of all
that has been done." Two days later, he was again placed in house arrest for the
kidnapping and murder of two bodyguards of the then President Salvador Allende
who were arrested the day of the 1973 coup d’etat and executed by a firing squad
during what was called the Caravan of Death episode. Pinochet died a few days later on 10 December 2006 without having
been convicted of any of the many serious crimes of which he was accused.
Note: This is draft #2 and perhaps the final edition of this prose-poem.
Ron Price
7 June 2010
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Ron Price has been married for 47 years(in 2014) and a teacher for 35. He has been a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).