For Grass and Galeano.

Two men born in the century of the wind that sought life on paper pages. Such a fragile thing was paper in the century of the wind.

One was born in the old world. The old world he was born into had become sickened with war, racial fear, economic disasters, political utopianism, and paranoia. It was in the grips of the of the spirits unveiled by the events of Paris 1919. He grew up in a city that became captured by the cultists of a man born of the bad eggs of the wounded old world. He joined the children's crusade, marching like a tiny soldier thrown in the ranks with the old and the forgotten. The cultist warned that the barbarians would come, and come they did. An army that moved on rape, plunder, and gasoline thundered across the old world, driving tanks over refugee columns, crucifying and hanging people, and planting red flags across the lands squandered and poisoned by the cult. This man dreamed of a boy who refuses to grow up, pounds on a metal drum, and screams to shatter glass. He dreams of his country and the times it endures, as it births the new.

The other man, this hopeful believer in pen and paper as icons against the monolith of greed and insanity at the heart of the century of the wind, was born in the new world. He was born in a land especially filled with promise, culture and riches. It was compared to the old world, which this man felt a little apprehensive about as he knew there were  wonders here that could never be replicated in the frozen ways of the old world. The economy began to suffer and his country started to get rigid and fearful. Students claiming they had the spirit of Tupac Amaru retreated and began to buy guns, training themselves as urban guerillas. The state formed an army to fight its own people and the streets shook with the martial columns that moved down them. Torture chambers grew like fungus everywhere darkness lingered. This man began to fear his own country and clutching a couple notebooks he fled. This confirmed his dread of patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacists, and the the envoys, prophets, and yes man of the great machine to the north. This machine controlled the new world by owning its loans, and soon it ruled over the old world when it collapsed in rot. His only weapons was history, writing utensils, and his own imagination. This connected him to the man who crawled out of the collapsed and putrid body of the old world, pushing through its dark and frenzied convulsions like a maggot through forlorn meat.He saw new orders born and died, and he wrote fables to explain them to those in remote future ages. He drew grotesques that only hinted at the madness loose in the century of the wind.

Both these men died in the age of distraction, their messages clearly written for those with the time and patience to read them. We find it harder and harder in this age to find time for such things, we risk losing the histories of the century of the wind. What lessons and horrors could be repeated when the distractions fades, when history returns to the ever present now?.