Well damn

Digging through mountains of old letters and crap to find Manolo's story, and all I have managed to do is depress myself with stuff from my past, stuff I really should throw out.  There is so much of my life that's caught up in meaningless bits of paper, a good bonfire is the solution. But I tried to stay focused on Manolo's story, searching through it all.  Can I really have just lost it,like a total chump?

It would help if I could actually recall the story properly. Or his name for that matter.

No intention to be disrespectful, I just... no, there's no real excuse except that it was a long time ago.

Damn,  damn, damn.

Castro, Churchill, Manolo

Second day of thick frost; we have pretty much lost this entire month to illness. A shame, I enjoy November.

Friends on FB are still arguing  over Castro. I'm going to pick at the bones one more time, in lieu of finding Manolo's work. Not whether Castro was good or bad, because he seems to have been both, and I don't think one can excuse the other. But why is the fight over his virtue or lack of it so vicious?

It can't be because of all the people he has had killed, because from Obama to Churchill, there's blood on all hands. Is Churchill a hero? Ask anyone whose family recalls the Bengal famine. Genocide, murder, war-mongering... shall we total up the corpses? And we call him a hero because he was good for us,necessary for us at an  all-important point in our nation's history.  Our terms for victory were different to Castro's but they were still damned expensive for anyone Churchill deemed expendable.  Ah, we might argue, but at least Winnie didn't kill his own.  But of course, some commentators say he did just that, that Churchill let the city of Coventry being bombed flat so that the Germans wouldn't guess their code had been cracked (this argument has been strongly challenged: links to the debunking argument in comments). According to these, he sacrificed some for the good of the many, for the security of the country.  I know Coventrians who would accept that sacrifice, but I know just as many who resent the destruction of their city, and think that had the same equation demanded the fall of London, Winnie would have cast the rest of the country into the sea. Scottish history recalls Churchill sending tanks into Glasgow for the suppression of workers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square
Winnie was a clever man, a witty man, the man of the hour, the needed man.  But he was not a good man.

Why then, are we so reluctant to apply the same judgement to Castro?

Is it because our government was on the side of Castro's enemies? Is it because the idea of a working communist government was such a threat to all these old oligarchies?  And yes, Manolo, I do hear, I do remember some of what you said. He did terrible things. He was a tyrant, and I understand why you hated him. But that's not why the West hates him, because the West buddies up with tyrants all the time. The West hates him because on his own terms, he won. They could not defeat him and they could not own him.

It doesn't mean he was undeserving of hatred.  But it does mean that the rich man with the megaphone may be no judge.

Well great

Trying to write, captivated by the idea of writing a script for straight drama.

Start writing. Within six lines it's not 'straight' drama, it's horror. It probably needs to be a book. So how do you find a new thing you could write? Try playing with a new style or approach, and just write down what you see, and subject matter will turn up,like a sculpture out of a tree root.