Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 17

_Ex£ectingJ|he^

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are men and women like Lenny Skutnik, who dove
into the water—before television cameras—to save
an airplane crash survivor, or Reginald Andrews,
who saved a blind man's life by pulling him from
beneath a New York subway car. Both men were
saluted as heroes by the President of the United
States. We can admire such isolated heroic acts; the
pasts and the futures of such heroes remain
comfortably irrelevant and invisible.^®
Why "comfortably'? Because, as forms of entertainment, heroism and
tragedy inevitably become boring. When they no longer succeed in
diverting us, something else must take their place—^another plane
crash, another act of terrorism, another daring rescue—only to be
replaced by yet another public spectacle. In other words, the staying
power of yesterday's heroes and yesterday's tragedies has been
virtually annihilated in a culture of "disconnected present moments
which jostle each other but never form a continuous (much less
logical) progression."^^ Of course, if this sort of temporal cleansing
works against the formation of enduring culture-heroes such as we've
had in the past, it also helps to erase the memory of culture-villains,
whose misdeeds are forgiven because forgotten.
The opposite is also true. If the denigration of the heroes of
yesteryear is really a process of selective forgetting, then the same
may be said of the tragedies of yesteryear. I began this discussion by
mentioning Columbus as the favorite historical whipping boy of
multiculturalists in the past three decades. The case against
Columbus is summed up for many by David Stannard in his popular
book, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New
World, which puts the death toll of native populations at one
hundred million in the two centuries after the coming of the
Spaniards. That many of these deaths were the result of pandemic
diseases like swine influenza which followed the arrivals of Heman
Cortez and Francisco Pizarro cannot diminish the horror of what the
Spaniards did to the Indians of North and South America in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
For me, however, questions of whether Columbus himself
should be held personally responsible for the crimes of the