Chicago, Alaa Aswany [first e reader .TXT] 📗

while their own sons lived a soft life away from danger. They were also saying that the American dream was an illusion, a race with no end in sight in which nobody won. During that race, Americans worked hard and engaged in cutthroat competition that showed no mercy, to get a house, a fancy car, and a second home. They spent their life chasing a mirage only to discover at the end that they had been deceived, that the result of the race had been fixed before it even began: a handful of millionaires controlled everything, and their ratio to the total population hadn’t increased at all over fifty years, whereas the number of poor people kept rising at a rapid pace.

The day the pig was nominated was a truly historic day and the message was conveyed to the public. Millions of Americans began to think that those young men and women might be right. There were violent confrontations with the police, and the parks turned into real battlefields. The police struck at the demonstrators with all possible means and with utmost cruelty: with thick nightsticks, water hoses, tear gas bombs, and rubber bullets. The students defended themselves by throwing stones and hair spray canisters that they lit and turned into small bombs. Many were seriously wounded. Ambulances carried hundreds away, and hundreds of others were arrested. That day Graham’s head was busted open by a heavy club, and he spent two weeks in the hospital. To this day he still has a scar behind his ear. Those were the days of real struggle. He was arrested several times, put on trial, and imprisoned for various periods of time, one of which was a full six-month sentence on charges of inciting riots, damage to public property, and assaulting the police. But he never regretted what he had done. He was homeless for years, even though he could have, had he wanted, led a comfortable life, for he had a medical degree, with distinction, from the famous University of Chicago and could land a good job any time he wanted. But he believed in the revolution as if it were a religion for which he had to sacrifice. He would come out of prison only to demonstrate again. Without a job or source of income, he lived with his fellow rebels. They were certain that the world would change, that the revolution would triumph in America as it had in many other places, that the capitalist system would collapse and that they, with their hands, would make a new, fair, and humane America; that all Americans would secure the future of their children. They believed that fierce immoral competition would be gone forever, that the signs declaring OUR LOSS IS YOUR GAIN posted by stores going out of business to play on people’s greed for cheap bargains, would disappear. Those were the dreams of the revolutionary youth, but they were not realized.

The Vietnam War ended and so did the revolution. Most of the comrades joined the system they had rebelled against only yesterday. They got jobs, had families and children, and some of them made vast fortunes. They all changed their way of thinking, except for John Graham, who was now over sixty but who remained loyal to the revolution. He didn’t marry because he did not believe in the institution of marriage, and he couldn’t shoulder the responsibility of bringing children into this rotten world. His faith was never shaken in the possibility of creating a better world if Americans got rid of the capitalist machine that controlled their lives. Despite his advanced age he continued to be active in various leftist organizations: the Friends of Puerto Rico, the American Socialist Union, the Vietnam Generation, the antiglobalization movement, and others. He has paid an exorbitant price for his struggle. He’s ended up a lonely old man—no family and no children. He had two relationships that didn’t work out and left him with deep emotional wounds. He had two bouts of depression and was institutionalized and tried to commit suicide. But he got over the crises, not because of medication or therapy, but thanks to an internal solid core, which he called on and which didn’t fail him. He also got over his problems thanks to his love for his work and his total immersion in it. For despite his controversial political affiliations and his problems, Graham is one of only a few professors in the science of medical statistics, and he has published dozens of important papers throughout the world. He considered statistics to be a creative art depending on inspiration more than just math. He had a favorite sentence with which he began his lectures to graduate students: “Statistics has suffered a historical injustice brought about by mediocre bourgeois minds that consider statistics merely as a means of tallying profit and loss. Keep that in mind: statistics is a truthful means of viewing the world; it is simply logic flying with the two wings of imagination and numbers.”

Despite Graham’s tremendous popularity at the university as a nice personality, an extraordinary scholar, and a great lecturer, he rarely had genuine friendships: those colleagues sympathetic to him considered him a kind of funny, interesting folkloric personality, eliciting curiosity. But they also kept a distance between him and themselves. As for conservatives, like George Roberts, they shied away from him and attacked him publicly as an atheist, an anarchist, and a communist who espoused evil, subversive ideas. Thus John Graham’s life proceeded, approaching its expected end: the old, leftist university professor who would live and die alone, with the most important events in his life behind him. He began to feel, day after day, that his ties to the world were eroding. He tried to imagine what the end would be like: How was he going to die? Perhaps in his office or while giving a lecture, or maybe he would have a heart attack at night and his neighbors would find