[1]  Why quotations from a book as passé and incomprehensible to contemporary readers as Paradise Lost? Dr. Lorenzo felt that a major threat to the U.S. of America’s perennial Christmas dream of ‘good will toward men and peace on earth’ came from the USA’s own tendency to commit grave errors of tact (and discretion) when dealing with other nations and peoples, errors that could spark ever more war and acts of revenge that might last for generations and even lead to extermination of mankind entire. Such tragically grave errors as the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon Vietnam War, or Nixon’s execrable Secret Bombing of Cambodia, or Bush Jr.’s benighted invasion of Iraq, he felt, were often caused in large part by a lack of any true understanding of other nations and their histories, leaders and peoples, their thinking and beliefs, and their traditional ways of living in the physical space in which they lived. And he felt that a large part of the solution to this prodigious challenge was for Americans – the very people who voted and elected officials who made delicate foreign policy and foreign intervention decisions that might impact all of humanity for ever and ever, especially our own future progeny – to get to know INTIMATELY other TIMES and other CLIMES, so as to make better decisions when electing – or working for – the U.S. government. The editors, therefore, respectful of the Dr.’s perennially vehement feelings on this subject, feelings which drove him lifelong to write, and which impacted greatly almost every piece of art or writing he ever produced, decided to bookend the Dr.’s Hooked on Cocaland with brief excerpts of closely related works from other TIMES and CLIMES: (1) Moses’ Genesis in the Bible, a sacred origin story passed down orally for centuries by a priestly tribal culture of the Middle East (the ancient Israelites or Hebrews, later called Jews), a story perhaps first told by parents to their children as early as 1000 B.C. (or even earlier), then written down in its present form a few hundred years B.C. – this quote appears on the ‘Frontispiece’, the first page after the title page; (2) Carl Jung’s afterword to a book the French title of which meant “Man in Search of His Soul,” written in Europe during a worldwide human holocaust in the first half of the 20^th century, WWII – also on the Frontispiece ; and (3) Milton’s Paradise Lost from late 17^th century England, Milton having been a Puritan Calvinist Englishman (very devout conservative Protestant Christian like those who founded New England) who very much based his life and writing on a deep belief in Biblical teaching regarding Man’s ‘fall’ from God’s ‘grace’, and regarding God’s offer of ‘salvation’ despite Man’s gross disobedience and other imperfections – and these quotes from Milton’s Paradise Lost may be found in two locations: on the present page, and in the book’s last chapter, which contains the Dr.’s final diary entries, those for October 17-30, 1994.

Dr. Lorenzo felt that Americans did not understand important aspects of their own history, America's own past TIMES. Especially deficient, he taught, was any comprehension of the 16th, 17th and 18th century Calvinists from Europe and their descendants who played such a major role in founding the USA, especially its constitution, and setting in motion the 'American world-view' and 'the American dream'. Their Calvinist theology and philosophy of life, which was also the Calvinist world-view on which mj lorenzo's parents raised him, lay behind his and our choice to use quotes from the past TIMES of the Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost. Americans might have forgotten the Bible and the Puritan, Congregationalist, Baptist, Presbyterian and other Calvinist founders, as he said, but they still understood the concept of 'finding a paradise and then losing it again'. Consciously they may have rejected the Bible and Milton as passé and incomprehensible, but UN-consciously they were still sufficiently part and parcel of Western civilization that they carried the Bible and Milton in their genes, and needed to keep track of when the USA's Calvinist world-view was -- unconsciously or consciously -- affecting its -- and their own individual -- major decision-making, like electing a president.

 

As for other CLIMES, the present diary itself from Dr. Lorenzo’s first trip to Colombia can also be said to be a studied effort in understanding another ‘clime’ or culture, a very different and exotic part of the world, ‘different’ from the USA, that is, quite different in many ways, in fact, from most of Western civilization, of which it is usually considered to be a part nevertheless. The Dr.’s understanding of Colombia and its people and leaders was far from perfect in 1994, yet the diary presents the story of a format he used – a format which may serve as a model for others wanting to make a similar effort – to attempt to BEGIN to learn to understand much more deeply any person or people of a very different CLIME. Even if there were no calculable material gain for one’s country or self in achieving such a deep understanding of other peoples, no apparent immediate gain either military or economic, it would still be the right and smart thing to do, he said, to make a gargantuan effort to understand every people on the planet; because, there would be ‘spiritual’ or ‘psychological’ gain: for it would be ‘loving and forgiving toward our planetary neighbors’. Getting to know sincerely and deeply someone strange and different was loving, he said; and learning to tolerate their strange or objectionable ways was forgiving. Living in very poor Mexico, he said, had reinforced this conviction in him  'a hundredfold'. And Western civilization was founded not just on ancient Greek and Renaissance ‘Reason’ and science, he said, but also – primarily and originally, and more importantly – on the teachings of Jesus Christ, whose core message had always been ‘love and forgiveness’.

 

We had to study ancient and recent past TIMES, he said, to understand how we got to where we are. For: part of the challenge of understanding our vast neighbor Latin America today, the Dr. felt increasingly after his ‘retirement’ to Mexico in 2001, was to comprehend the fact that large swaths of the population ‘south of the border’, meaning all over Latin America, were still living – psychologically, spiritually and even culturally – in the antiquated European world of the late Middle Ages, before the Protestant Reformation; which meant that to understand Colombia NOW, one had to understand what life in Roman Catholic authority-adoring Southern Spain had felt like 500 years ago, around the year 1500, and how it had gotten that way; and this was a difficult task for many people from the U.S.A., a country created and founded primarily by ardently religiously conservative, freedom-loving, anti-authority Protestants from northwest Europe, who before coming to the New World (from a part of Europe very different from Spain) had suffered through two or more centuries of physical and mental persecution by none other than authority-adoring Catholics (or Catholic-resembling Anglicans and Lutherans).

 

And were there any other reasons to study other CLIMES? One time the Dr. offered Sammy an example of how it served the USA and even the whole world, for us to understand another people thoroughly and correctly. He said that President (‘Ike’) Eisenhower claimed after the event that a large part of the success of his Normandy landing, the invasion of Europe in 1944 which led to the defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany, saving a whole planetful of humanity from the inhuman scourge of Nazi humanity-hating tyranny, derived from Ike’s gut sense of how a German warmonger such as Hitler would have been thinking, a gut sense which came partly from the fact that Ike himself was descended from Germans, his Eisenhower forebears having come from the Rhineland; and he had also studied the war history of Europe while a college student at West Point, of course. His gut sense was that Hitler and most of his German generals would be expecting the Allied invasion to come at them through the Low Countries, because of the unhindered ease of access there to the Rhine and to Germany and all of northwestern Europe, from the sea, and because historically almost all invasions of western Europe had occurred at this most vulnerable point for that very reason, as he had learned at West Point Military Academy. For these reasons he determined to ‘surprise’ Hitler with an invasion much further south, via Normandy (not the Low Countries), in a spot where there were high cliffs just past the beaches, followed by a much longer trek over open countryside, and finally a set of mountain ranges, before they could ever get to the Rhine River and Germany proper. Surprise the German military this unusual and difficult kind of invasion did, catching them off guard, bringing about one of the greatest war victories in history, and saving everybody in the world, for many generations, from having to live under the insufferable Nazi monster mega-regime (which certainly would have knocked off America, once it had done the same with England and all Europe, as it almost did). And all this just because Ike, though a multi-generation American, had a deep understanding of the German character.

 

The Dr. added that Eisenhower had been right about another very big, important and memory-worthy foreign ‘clime’, too. Given his military training at West Point and his having lived in tropical jungled Panama as a young soldier and then tropical jungled Southeast Asia, in the Philippines (where he was General Douglas McArthur’s assistant), he advised President Kennedy, during the transition from the Eisenhower presidency to the Kennedy presidency in late 1960 and early 1961, NOT to put American military on the ground in Vietnam because ‘the Southeast Asia jungle will eat them alive’. But, and however, Kennedy refused to listen to the most successful army general in world history and did just as he was advised by Ike not to do. Kennedy thereby set in motion one of the worst military and prestige disasters in USA history, our military meddling in the Vietnamese civil war.

But if one buys none of this, she or he may read what the 20th century's most towering student of world history, Arnold Toynbee, said on the subject at age 83 in 1972 (caps ours):

"But why study history at all? Why concern ourselves with anything beyond the range of our own time and place? At the present day there is a practical reason for taking a wider view. Within the last five hundred years, the whole face of the globe, together with its air-envelope, has been knit together physically by the amazing advance of technology, but Mankind has not yet been united politically, and we are still strangers to each other in our local ways of life, which we have inherited from the times before the recent 'annihilation of distance'. This is a terribly dangerous situation. The two World Wars and the present worldwide anxiety, frustration, tension, and violence tell the tale. MANKIND IS SURELY GOING TO DESTROY ITSELF UNLESS IT SUCCEEDS IN GROWING TOGETHER INTO SOMETHING LIKE A SINGLE FAMILY. For this, we must become familiar with each other; and this means becoming familiar with each other's history, since Man does not live just in the immediate present. We live in a mental time-stream, remembering the past and looking forward -- with hope or with fear -- to an oncoming future." (Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: The First Abridged One-Volume Edition, pg. 10. New York: Oxford University Press, distributed in the U.S. by American Heritage Press, 1972.) (Caps ours.)

  

[2]  As for Milton’s spelling: John Milton, the highly educated literary genius who authored Paradise Lost, went to one of the best universities, Cambridge, and then after graduating continued to self-educate. His spelling was not so much ‘inaccurate’, therefore, as, more properly stated, unlike our own; because English language spelling was left up to the user in the 1600s. There were small dictionaries, but they had not become standard yet, and even Shakespeare spelled his own name in several different ways at different times. Spelling had not yet been codified or regulated in 1677, into its present state of near-universal agreement on correct English spelling. Truly ‘universal agreement’, however, is a condition obtainable perhaps only in an imagined world where all English speakers and spellers would be ruled by the same government, one that defined spelling rules and killed those who broke them so that their errors could not spread. Even today the British spell the word endeavor ‘incorrectly’ as ‘endeavour’, or, as the Brits might say, those crazy upstart Americans spell the word endeavour incorrectly as ‘endeavor’. Meanwhile, versions of Milton’s poetry are available which ‘correct’ or update his spelling to modern standards, to make the reading easier; but many prefer the original for its antique poetic feel. Actually, Milton wrote Paradise Lost in all caps (!). (Facsimiles of the original manuscript in Milton’s all-caps handwriting are still available in some U.S. public libraries.)

 

[3]  See footnote 2 above for an explanation of Milton’s spelling. As for this particular quote: the opening stanza of Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, is a prayer for help in writing his grand book-length poem about ‘the fall of man’, a humble prayerful petition first to ‘the muse’, and then, and ‘chiefly’, to the ‘Holy Spirit’. The ‘muse’ was the pagan Greek goddess of poetry and/or music, and the ‘Holy Spirit’ meant the God of Calvinist Puritan Christians (like Milton), an omnipotent and omniscient God, frighteningly powerful but also loving and forgiving, who could dwell inside man when invited and allowed, and could inspire his words and deeds to holy use. Thus Milton left no base uncovered when begging divine help to explain via poetry how the earth had ended up ‘cursed’ and its inhabitants expelled from Paradise by God. (Sneak peak: it was because Adam and Eve disobeyed a holy proscription God had left them with: to NOT lose their innocence by learning to distinguish the difference between good and evil. Other mammals and animals have remained forever ‘innocent’ in the sense that they barely if ever have distinguished between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’; but when it came to the mammal-animal Homo sapiens, with humankind’s big and highly developed brain, as Moses’ Genesis tells the story, the very first woman and man in history disobeyed God’s very explicit command and warning, and ate of the miraculous tree in Paradise the fruit of which, once tasted, gave immediate knowledge of the distinction between good and bad, right action and wrong action.)

 

“But isn’t that story of Paradise and the Garden of Eden just a silly ‘myth’ somebody invented?” a high school student asked Sammy Martinez in his after-school reading club in 2011, when they read and discussed Hooked on Cocaland. “Why would Dr. Lorenzo take it so seriously, or you, or why should we?”

 

“Well,” Sammy thought a moment, “don’t you take seriously the ‘myths’ of your Tewa San Juan tribe? Don’t those ancient Tewa origin stories impact your life in any way?”

 

“I danced in the deer dance and I was initiated and learned all the stories, I can tell a bunch of those tales, I like Coyote stories because they teach you not to be stupid, but I don’t know if I believe our ancestors came from a hole in the ground. That sounds stupid.”

 

“Do you think it helps to know the stories our grandparents were raised on and believed, ‘stupid’ or not?” Sammy asked the student, looking at everyone else too.

 

The first student was still thinking when a girl said, “It helps me understand why the Pueblo tribes had a hard time accepting European religion and values. The Pueblo idea of where everything comes from seems so different from the white man’s Christian idea.”

 

“Is there any value in having that kind of ‘understanding’ of your grandparents?” Sammy asked.

 

“Yes,” said nearly all of the students present that day, most of whom were of Pueblo Native American background, at least in part, just like Sammy.

 

“I think,” said Sammy, “that whether you think you ‘believe’ the ancient stories or not, you’ll find yourself referring to them lifelong as a reference point, as a source of examples and metaphors, a common language by which to talk with other tribal members about serious matters. And this is what Dr. Lorenzo and the editorial board are doing with the old stories. We’re using the common language of myth to talk about mj lorenzo’s strange myth-like or dream-like experience of stumbling upon the real Colombia in 1994. To comprehend his experience he and we are drawing on tribal myth, European white man’s tribal myth, as it is told in the Bible. We could have used the Buddhist notion of Nirvana, or the Hindu idea of the world egg; one of the editors suggested those ideas too; but we felt Genesis would work better, because it was the creation story on which mj was raised as a little boy, the one on which the people of Colombia were raised too, and one that much of the rest of the world knew as well.

 

“Dr. Lorenzo and I agreed that his experience of finding the ‘paradise’ of Santisima Cruz in Colombia ‘replicated’ the Garden of Eden experience, or could be seen as a ‘parallel’ to it. In fact, if you remember, he referred to the Garden of Eden in one of his diary entries and compared Santisima Cruz to it. [See sub-section 55.] In 1994 when he wrote this diary, he was just emerging from a regressed psychotic state, and was still so regressed and childlike that at times he could barely distinguish between good and bad; and so, when they took him to Santisima Cruz in the Colombia backcountry, he was so enchanted and enamored of everyone and everything, he reverted to a state of ‘childlike innocence’, so to speak, and re-experienced briefly a bit of the Garden of Eden’s paradisal state of mind, and remained for a while so overwhelmed by it, so totally delighted, so accepting of everything, so incapable of seeing any right or wrong about it, any good or bad, that life and everything about it seemed (for a day or two, at least) incomparably delicious and God-blessed.

 

“Can you find any parallel at all between the Bible’s creation story in Genesis, and our San Juan creation story that we came from a hole in the ground?” Sammy asked, then studied a room full of perplexed frowns until a face brightened.

 

“Yes,” the same girl said. “Coming from a hole in the ground is a little like coming from the dust of the earth.”

 

“Good job!” Sammy said. “Maybe the difference between our Tewa myth and the Judeo-Christian Creation story in Genesis isn’t as big as we thought!” He had them look at the frontispiece of Hooked on Cocaland for the verse, Genesis 3:19, then he read it aloud, changing the word ‘dust’ to ‘earth’: “From earth thou art, and unto earth shalt thou return,” Sammy said.

 

“From a dusty hole in the earth thou art, and unto a dusty hole in the earth shalt thou return,” said the first kid.

 

My Spanish grandmother taught me a poem about that, said the girl:

 

De la tierra fui formado,

La tierra me da de comer;

La tierra me a sustentado,

Y al fin yo tierra he de ser.

 

“Which means?” said Sammy on behalf of non-Spanish-speakers.

 

“From the earth I was formed,
The earth gives me to eat;
The earth has sustained me,
And in the end I earth must be."

 

And they packed up to get out of there, agreeing to meet again in a month, after reading Gabriel García Márquez' 100 Years of Solitude.

 “i was looking at piles of photos... and Ibrahim’s [eyes were] shiftier than i’d remembered”

(first Colombian diary, Monday, 10/24/94)