Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 18

14 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: