By Ariel Dorfman, NationofChange.org
For the last decade, I have been haunted by voices from the other side of death. In this way, back in 2003 I transcribed the words of Pablo Picasso after a tapestry version of his famed painting Guernica at the entrance to the Security Council was covered over at the U.N. just before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was to present the Bush administration case justifying an invasion of Iraq. From the depths of ancient Mesopotamia, I transcribed the words of Hammurabi, the exalted prince of Babylon, as he reviled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for laying waste to his ancient land. And in that same year I found that Christopher Columbus, too, had words for the new warriors/conquerors of the twenty-first century, while the poets William Blake and Franceso Petrarca asked Laura Bush how she could sleep with the man responsible for so many deaths.
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