Howie Good

The Killers

Jesus appears at my bedside one morning. I’m still bleary-eyed from sleep. He shows me the holes in his hands and feet and the wound in his side. Back when I was teaching at the University of North Dakota, a student of mine had had both hands blown off in the mountain jungles of Guatemala while serving in the U.S. Special Forces. “Follow the blood trail,” Jesus tells me, “then come back and I’ll love you forever.” The best I can do is promise to try. It’s the end of the so-called “American century.” Conscienceless killers disguised as police are prowling factories and airports and schools for new victims, and all with the sanction of a government of liars and thieves. The lamp beside the golden door has gone out. My grandparents were poor Jews from the shtetl – in current parlance, “garbage people” from “shithole countries.” And just look at me. My face, with its hollows and raised patches, its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a map, sort of, a map of a country I no longer recognize.

Howie Good, a professor emeritus, has written and edited textbooks on media ethics.