AMY GOODMAN: As you live in this country, one of the big issues of war: torture. Your thoughts about that, coming from where you’ve come from?
ISABEL ALLENDE: I do not think anybody in their right mind can approve of torture—nobody. First of all, it’s not effective. When you torture someone, you get the wrong information. The horrible thing about torture is that you don’t need to be a psychopath to torture. Almost anybody can do it, if they are trained to do it. And the victim and victimizer are both horribly traumatized by this experience. We lived that in Chile, and we know that it leaves scars in the society for generations. This needs to be stopped in Guantanamo, in Abu Ghraib, in all the secret prisons that the United States is using today to torture people. No one can approve of that.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you say you come out of a country of torture, whose whole population has been tortured, one way or the other, in Chile?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Thirty years have passed since the military coup, and still there are people traumatized, families that lost children, people that are still looking for their grandchildren or their children that died in torture and their bodies were never found. No one is accountable. There is impunity, you know? And thirty years later, we have democracy, and still there is impunity for the torturers, who are walking in the streets. Michelle Bachelet lived in the same building with her torturer. She would find him in the elevator. This is the president of Chile. This is how traumatized a society can be.
AMY GOODMAN: Isabel Allende, I want to thank you so much for joining us. Her book is The Sum of Our Days
GROOVALUJAH! Isabel Allende is a proper Artist, a true mythologist, aware of her powers to relieve or increase Suffering.
Croppings and scarification are the marks of a cult upon its members, willing or not. We are being herded around like god-forsaken cattle to the slaughter (c.f., the Holocausts that repeat with terrible regularity). The scars left by the Shock Doctrine are purposeful and deliberate. This is how we shape behavior, shape the Behaver, to fit the policies of mad mythologists like Karl Rove and Hermann Goerring.
We reduce our bodies to mechanisms: we think of our physiology as a machine. Who denies their own biochemistry induces gastric distress, right?
Why do we never ADDUCE? Why do we never think of our higher powers, our "better angels?" Why does it sound odd to say, Isabel Allende is a goddess? It's just as true, just as obvious, as the sound of her voice or the sight of her face or the words in ink on paper in her books.
Why do we accept reduction ad absurdio of our very souls? Sister Isabel's evocation of her mother as her soul is cosmic. She lives her life in the womb of her mother's love, as we all live in the Womb of Mother Gaia.
Whence comes this idea of exile? Why the emphasis on division and atomization over Identity? If the Holy Trinity can be a union of three aspects of the same Divinity, why then aren't we?
Cuz we been myth-jacked to Hell, and are being stuck with the Bill!
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