Today is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Ché Guevarra. It’s also the day that the U.S. government officially celebrates Columbus Day. At first glance, the coincidence may seem like a match made in heaven for folks like Hugo Chávez, who renamed the holiday Day of Indigenous Resistance in 2002 and sported the iconic Ché t-shirt to the World Social Forum in 2005.

And for me also (I admit I had a gigantic poster of Ché on my wall in high school), the overlap of red-letter days has provided the fodder for a blog – albeit, not of the celebratory variety. I’m sure I had some fuzzy notion in high school that Ché stood for freedom from oppression, disenfranchisement, poverty, just like the fuzzy notion I’d been fed in elementary school that Christopher Columbus was a great man who discovered America. While both of those statements may be true from a certain perspective, it’s the narrow one of the establishment, both left and right.

After the Cuban revolution, Ché’s first job was head of the main prison, La Cabaña (The Cottage), where enemies of the new state, then dissidents, and eventually gays were incarcerated or sent to labor camps. Two years after Castro came to power, there were 300,000 Cubans in prison—one out of every twenty-one citizens of Cuba. According to Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Ché Guevarra, Ché signed 400 death warrants and personally executed as many as 180 people during his first three months at the prison. Stalin and Mao would surely have cheered on the extermination of back-talk, debate, indifference, and alternative lifestyles, but you have to wonder what Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and Prince Harry see in the guy to admire.

Not only that, but there exists the fact of Ché’s legacy and the hundreds of dissidents in Cuba’s prisons at this very moment. In 2003, ten independent librarians decided to offer their solidarity to librarians in Cuba and to join in the demand by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for the release of Cuban prisoners of conscience. For some reason, this decision was not supported by their colleagues at the American Library Association.

Back to Columbus: While the great tragedy of disease perpetuated by the Spanish colonists was not deliberate or even understood at the time (approximately 85% of the native population of America died of infections, primarily smallpox), Columbus personally carried out acutely cruel punishments and death sentences on specific persons and tribes. The Taino of Hispaniola no longer populate this planet.

On the other hand, I don’t see his image on street corners, advertisements, or a president’s chest. Columbus is no poster-boy for explorers and adventurers. No fashion photographer was standing around on a foredeck in 1492, ready to snap the photo of the century like Korda got his in 1960—the photo that ubiquitously adorns the mugs and t-shirts. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, I think in this case it says more about the person who is buying than the man named Ché himself.

Ché once said, “Those who shut down the doors to peaceful resolutions open the doors to violent revolutions.” He should know.

It was on the bus that I first encountered censorship. No, the bus driver didn’t care what I read, but the Ann did. She was a senior and eldest daughter of a prominent local English teacher. Ann’s father had strict ideas about good and proper English for his family, and these romances were not among the choices. In fact, they were banned, prohibited.

But there I was, day after day – two whole hours every day -- knees up against the back of the seat in front of me, weeping for Ashley or accepting violets from Bonaparte. One day she asked if she could borrow the book when I finished. Of course. But, she said, I would have to take it home with me in the afternoon, and return it to her in the morning.

This we did for a whole year. She would mark her page and slip the book into a plastic bag; I’d put it away with my homework. Now, both of us were slouched against the windows reading.

But, what I want to talk about is the difference between her experience and mine. The difference being that my mother had also read these books and we could talk about them. We did talk about them. Sure, Ann and I perhaps chatted about the stories together, but that could hardly compare with the insights and direction of a parent. Ann’s father, by censoring his daughter, did not stop her from seeking out and finding the literature she desired, but he did quash the opportunity to teach. While censorship may always be a futile exercise, conversation can never be called a waste.

It’s the third day of autumn, and the windows are open, the fountain splashing. My children have been back in school for several weeks now, the refrigerator clicks on and off, the cats snooze… But rather than catching up, cleaning up, and throwing out — those chores of post-summer vacation — I long for the wild blue yonder.

Used to be, in the times between and just after college, that we’d throw a few things in a paper bag and take off for an island in Superior, a martini in Louisiana, the horizon of Grand Tetons or San Francisco. Those were the pre-cassette days (or at least our cars didn’t have the equipment), so we listened to the radio, or we listened to the wind. Funny, I don’t remember great conversations from those trips. I recall tension, joy, the comfort of the glowing dials — but no breakthroughs in dialectic.

That’s the beauty of the journey, I suppose. Wool gathering may be a euphemism for aimless talk, but it has nothing to do with a train’s careful winding towards a destination, or the highway’s long exhalation of farewell.

A few years ago, John Gaterud and his family got in their car to drive five hours towards an actual product of this anti-wool gathering, this sensation of anticipation and release. They were going to see Jack Kerouac’s manuscript of On the Road. All 120 feet of it.

Gaterud writes, “So there in the low dark cool of the museum, unfurled and glowing beneath steelframed glass, lies On the Road in all its battered typescript glory; a story now fifty years long…”

That long road of a manuscript got Gaterud thinking, and this summer he released a 256-page compendium of the open road of new writing called The Blueroad Reader.

The large page and spare, handsome design are a relief for the eye, and the stories, poems, and essays divers, accomplished, often breathtaking. Independent press editors, take note: the fiction talent here is outstanding.

Gaterud says that this Blueroad Reader is only the first of many, for “…line by line, mile after mile, Jack is still talking after all these years. That’s why we’re publishing this book,… [hoping] to conjure visions for others to read and consider, reflections from passing roads while listening for that horn to blow.”

And we’ll be the figure in the rearview mirror, waving.

The Blueroad Reader

"Stardust and Fate"
New Writing from the Road / 2007
Blueroad Press
John Gaterud, Editor and Publisher
www.blueroadpress.com