Day 257 Finally

Today I saw the T.B. nurse, and passed Tefunk in the waiting room, who had just been seen. When I spoke to Ms. Oyen, she told me Tefunk had expressed gratitude to her that someone had intervened on his behalf, because he’d supposedly had much difficulty getting seen. I guess he felt obliged to take rather a different posture back in the dorm. In any event he was hospitalized today. Diagnosis: Pneumonia.

I am relieved for him and for us. Ms. Oyen also laughed about my dream

Also, today my bunkie, Steve, paroled. Earl moved into his bunk, so his now my new bunkie. I have dubbed us: "Lucy and Ethel." (I am definitely Lucy and Earl is definitely Ethel).

In other news, Sharif, my neighbor, received some books from an African-oriented alternative press. On his bunk, I saw with horror that one of them was “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” For those who don’t know, it is completely fictitious propaganda tract purporting to lay out the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. It dates from Czarist Russia and has was used by Nazis and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists to support their poisonous claims. I even read about it recently in an old issue of U.S. News and World Report that did a cover story on History’s Great Hoaxes.

I got into a brief exchange with Sharif, who felt that I couldn't make such a critical assessment of the book if I hadn't read it. I countered that I didn’t need to read Aryan Supremacist literature calling African-Americans "mud people” to know they were sprouting hate-based fiction disguised as fact.

I would be gratified if someone could send me the best, easiest to read, most authoritative but short material debunking “The Elders…” that they can find. I don’t want to argue with Sharif, I just want him to know the truth.

MCO 2004