I’ve been reading a book called Makers of the Modern World, by Louis Untermeyer. About the lives of the most important (in the opinion of Mr. Untermeyer) movers and shakers of our world from about 1850 to 1950, approx. 100 years more or less. It’s not meant to be biographical, or for the critical scholar, but rather an introduction to someone who may not know a lot about them, like me, and a brief sketch of their contributions, good or bad: their work, their thinking, their ideas, their expressions, and it includes such notables as Darwin, Marx,, Melville, Pasteur, Renoir, Freud, Checkov, Curie, the Wright Brothers, Churchill, Hitler, Dylan Thomas, among many others. It also mentions that “contribution” does not necessarily imply for the good, (e.g., Hitler and Stalin are among the group), only that they shook things up.
Lincoln is not in the list, but Henry Ford is – go figure. Anyway, after finishing the part on Churchill, a person who had many admirable qualities, one realizes that he was from the very beginning given to intervene all over the place. Hearing of a second rate guerrilla war, he went to Cuba on his own, when he was twenty, then to India as part of his regiment. Then Sudan, South Africa, you name it—he was all over the place, sometimes with a regiment, other times as war correspondent for some newspaper or other. By then he was 25, and with a price on his head. At 26, in The House of Commons. I read about him, and others like him, and I guess there is a bug in some people that directs them to go and get into the business of others, regardless of cost or outcome. A month ago, I came across a different story, the story of a Somalian Pirate with no education, no famous name, no money and nothing to eat, that arrived with a few comrades on the side of an oil tanker, took it over, sailed it to vicinity of Mogadishu, claiming a modest thirty million ransom from the Saudis for his trouble. Nobody got hurt, the poor Saudis, bless their heart, got their boat back, as well as all their oil, and unwittingly contributed to the economy in a country with no economy. It used to have one, before the world’s fishing fleet fished the coastal waters out of fish for them, and the few mining interest left once the workers decided that dying while working was the same dying when not working, and a lot less trouble. Anyway, I found this guy’s story more compelling than anyone else on the list—so far. This pirate, if that’s what we call him, was in his own waters, didn’t hurt anybody, and when he got paid, distributed the money among an entire village. A small village that was on the verge of disappearing. In other words, using a twenty dollar boat and what to him seemed a good idea, plus the help of a few comrades, he became a “river to his people,” which is the point I’ve been trying to make all this time.
mt