5/14/12

Pavement

The bull Oficial, from the ranch of the Arribas brothers, fought in Cadiz the 5th of October, 1884, caught and gored a banderillero, jumped the barrera and gored the picador Chato three times, gored a civil-guard, broke the leg and three ribs of a municipal guard, and the arm of a night watchman. He would have been an ideal animal to turn loose when the police are clubbing manifestants in front of the city hall. Had he not been killed a strain of police-hating bulls might have been bred which would give the populace the advantage they lost in street fighting with the disappearance of the paving stone. A paving stone at short range is more effective than a club or sabre. The disappearance of cobble and paving stones has been more of a deterrent to the overthrowing of governments than machine guns, tear bombs and automatic pistols. For it is in the clashes when the government does not want to kill its citizens but to club, ride down and beat them into submission with the flat of a sabre that a government is overthrown. Any government that uses the machine guns once too often on its citizens will fall automatically. Regimes are kept in with the club and the blackjack, not the machine gun or bayonet, and while there were paving stones there was never an unarmed mob to club.
--Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner, 1932. 111-112.