慢悠悠

‘ “And if I don’t accept, Colonel,” said Carl Barks. “After all, I’m an old man now. I don’t have much time left.”

The Colonel seemed immense, casting a shadow more gigantic than his own body on the wall. "If you don’t accept, you’ll lose the place you deserve in the movement of contemporary history. I’m telling you, I mean it, the Communists have a hero from the nineteenth century, and they’re always showing him off. His ideas stir up crises, his prophecies go unfulfilled, and his disciples fight among themselves. But we haven’t succeeded in banishing his confused rhetoric from our world. Confronting that man whose name was Karl Marx, we celebrate you, a man of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century, a man of the future, Carl Barks. We’re determined that history will preserve your name and not your adversary’s. He had his model for society: totalitarian, obscure, oppressive, and impoverished. In the face of that model, we, you and all of us, seek a world full of joy, order, healthy leisure and ennobling labor, satisfied faces and sunlight. Which is going to be mankind’s future, Mr. Barks? That’s what I’m asking you. Which future will you choose?” ’

— Ariel Dorfman, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, translated by George R. Shivers with the author