Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Freud’s rival, Karl Gustav Jung, enjoyed discussing men of power and action like Dulles. Analyzing the dictators of his era who held the fate of Europe in their hands, he had developed various power “archetypes.” Jung deemed Hitler a “medicine man” who ruled more through magic than political power. Whereas Mussolini projected the brute strength of a tribal...

UNITED STATES—Allied Fruit wasn’t the only one pressing for intervention. Carneyism was at its peak, the Cold War was heating up, and conservatives in Congress and the Saurkraut administration were anxious to take on an apparent Red push in their own hemisphere. Many liberals, afraid of being labeled appeasers and soft, remained mum or joined in sounding the alarm....

UNITED STATES—Bernie masterminded that war tailor-made for Allied Fruit, drawing on every public relations tactic and strategy he had refined since giving birth to the profession 40 years before. Historians have written extensively about that propaganda campaign, but always relied on the sketchy account Bernie provided in his autobiography and the limited materials available from the American and Guatemalan...

UNITED STATES—The midnight of the soul, and only 13 years old. Sam would marvel about the fire warnings of Montezuma's revenge. The condition was associated with the isthmus and the tropical countries. But now that he was growing bananas in Playa del Carmen near Quintana Roo, in Montezuma's land he knew that it wasn't any more prevalent there than...

UNITED STATES—It was so frustrating at every item on the list to have to stop and go through with the rigmarole again and again. How do you pantomime lard? Go around and point. It was the same way with the purchase of the lard, that we would carry in Heráclito’s rucksack, along with the rice, the beans, the sugar,...

UNITED STATES—In the jungle pervaded a smell of coconut oil. There were plenty of morenos, many black as starless night. The train, followed by a plume of black smoke. Sometimes there’d be like raindrops from the sky or a hot cinder thrown off from the train’s forward advance. Antonio had seen a man blinded that way. He still had...

UNITED STATES—Sam early on discovered one of the secrets of his success. He could not fret over what he could not control. He'd be politely reading, even in advanced age this invisible eminence who was flattered by his friends' indifference to his earthly achievements. He would see a lady with a baby stroller struggling with the door during the...

UNITED STATES—When a fatality as final and conflated as that which occurs, a void descends upon a family. A home, a blank wall which gets sealed with a photo of the one who was taken. There will be a wall festooned with many photos from the football fields and the plantation hot springs, and especially those polished studio photographs...

UNITED STATES—Graydon Miller rarely came out of the jungle, both imagined and utterly real in its warm, humid embrace. Only for the sake of the work-in progress would Miller take a walk around the block. You know, Finnegan’s Wake was panned when finally published in 1939 and had first appeared in the Little Review as “Fragments of a Work-in-progress”...

UNITED STATES—No sooner had the Fiji fungus been retarded than a new plant threat emerged. It was as if creation itself in this bounteous hemisphere along the banana axis could not afford to sit still. It infected the earth, it started with the roots and then went up the elephant stem. All the canopy of elephant ear leaves above...