Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 18
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Popular Culture Review
conquistadors naiss the mark. The myopic historical narratives of my
elementary school textbooks notwithstanding, the frenzy for
"deconstructing Columbus"—the title of one recent college course—
obscures the fact that this trend is only one manifestation of that far
more ubiquitous and multifaceted habit of mind I've attempted to
describe in this essay. What is the connection between the
devaluation of historical heroes like Columbus and the devaluation
of the concept of tragedy as a cultural paradigm? What happens
when the tragedies of the past are used to further the ideological
ends of the present?
To pray aloud over the centuries-old corpses of selected
native Americans for purely political ends is to conveniently ignore
the corpses of other, non-selected native Americans who died just as
violently, perhaps even more so, at the hands of their fellows. All
too often, when we are told about the "tragic crimes" of Columbus, we
aren't Informed about the "tragic crimes" perpetrated by the native
Americans against each other centuries before the beleaguered
Genoan navigator was born. To pretend that the Indians of MesoAmerica lived in a state of pastoral innocence before the Spaniards
showed up in 1519 "denies the humanity of the dead: their sins, their
virtues, their efforts, their failures," as Robert Hughes has written.
Let me offer a final symposium cushion to Hughes, whose
observations are worth quoting at length:
(RI ecent digs and the slow work of deciphering
glyphs, particularly at the site of Dos Pilas in
Guatemala, indicate that the classic period of the
Maya was ruined by a continuous state of war between
local rulers that began around 700 A. D. and devoured
the whole economy and ecology of the Mayan empire
by the 10th century. The Mayans fell by self-induced
ecological collapse, caused by a devotion to
unwinnable wars which was itself sustained by an
obsession with ideology— the ideology of the
transcendent god-king, viewed by his limestonetoting helots as the embodiment of the whole
universe.
As for Mexico before the conning of Columbus, Hughes concludes: