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Yakuza · Dance · Party
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Amber's kitten Cholito was euthanized this morning at the age of roughly three months. After the deaths of Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Steve McNair (felt especially here in Nashville) and Ed McMahon, the passing of a kitten might seem like a comically inconsequential thing to write about. I'm going to anyway.
Cholito appeared on Amber's doorstep after a long night of frantic mewing. Somehow, he scaled two or three flights of concrete steps and found his way to the door. Why Amber's door out of all the others in the apartment complex we weren't sure, but he strode in as soon as he was allowed and made the apartment his own. Amber's daughter Amy could not be convinced her mother hadn't planned the whole thing. He was tiny--with olive-yellow eyes and glossy black fur. His voice was loud, endearingly imperious.
Originally, Amber called him Carlito. She wanted a Latin gangster name, and it worked for him. Amy called him "Charlito" which ultimately became "Cholito"--"Little Cholo." "Cholo" is a Spanish word that has multiple meanings depending on which country's slang you go by. It can be anything from an insult meaning "dog" (from Nahuatl "xolotl") to the name of a subculture (the one Anglos generally refer to as "lowrider," if I'm not mistaken) to a term for a drug-dealer or gangster. It's a strange name for a kitten, but he had a machista bravado to him that made it fit--a swaggering little cabron with a big mouth and five switchblades per floppy paw.
But after awhile Cholito began to fade. He lost his energy, had accidents he shouldn't have been having, lost the urge to pounce on our feet or shout shrill, wordless curses at us for not letting him into the bedroom. He took to lying on a certain blanket and sleeping. If you picked him up, you could feel his ribs and backbone. I took him to Banfield Animal Hospital, and the doctor did some tests. She diagnosed feline leukemia.
There were two choices: put Cholito through a round of antibiotics that would ultimately lengthen his life by at most a year, or give him a humane, easy, dignified death. Talking about letting a kitten "die with dignity" will probably sound like PETA bullshit to some, but it was important to us that he not suffer. Here's where we leave Cholito for a moment and focus on his survivors.
Amber and I knew that telling Amy was going to be difficult. Amy is four--death isn't really a concrete concept in the world of a four year-old. Some suggested, with nothing but good intentions, that we just say that Cholito had gone away on vacation. That seemed like a much crueler thing to do than honestly tell her about Cholito's death. Children need to realize, I think, that death is not only a part of life, but that it's okay to be upset when you lose somebody. We decided we would tell her Cholito was sick, that it was important to spend time with him now, and that he was headed to the jungle-gardens of the Jaguar God, where he could hunt and explore and play with all the cats who had ever lived. We had it all planned out. But when we sat Amy down, something altogether different happened.
"Amy," I said. "Cholito is very sick, and he's going to die."
"He's going to die?" she said.
"Yes, but--"
"I don't want to talk about Cholito dying," she said.
"Well, he's going to go to meet the Jaguar God and--"
"No! I don't want to talk about that!" she said.
Finally, we offered to take her out for ice cream. On the car ride to Baskin-Robbins, she started to scream.
"I'm not your friend anymore, Hunter," she yelled.
"That's okay, Amy," I said.
"Ever, ever, ever again!"
"That's alright," I told her.
"No it isn't! I don't like you!"
"Baby, it's not his fault," said Amber.
"And I'm not going to sit with you, or play with you, or talk to you ever again!" she raged.
"That's fine," I said.
"No it isn't!"
"Don't take this personally," said Amber.
"I don't," I said.
One of the events that lead Stephen King to write "Pet Sematary" was the death of his daughter's cat, Smucky. King and his wife explained all about how Smucky was no longer in pain, how he had gone to be with God, and all the things people usually say when they lose somebody. An hour later, he heard a terrific crashing noise from his daughter's room and found her bouncing furiously up and down on her bed, shouting, "Smucky's my cat! Why can't God get his own!" King said (and I agree) that this is one of the sanest responses any human being can have. I got angry too, but not at Amy. I got mad at people who believe in God, who can spout such empty platitudes about faith and universal love and everything going according to some asinine "divine plan." We all cried.
This morning, we took Cholito back to the vet's office. He was bleary-eyed, his fur looking mangy and his voice weak. His limbs hung like a puppet's. We put the carrier in the back seat with Amy. "He's going to be scared," we told her. "So you keep him comfy, okay?"
"Okay," she said. Every time I hit a pot hole in the road or took a fast turn, Amy told me to be careful, because I was scaring Cholito. When we got to the animal hospital, Amber stayed in the car and Amy and I went inside. I carried Cholito in my arms. He felt weak, gave me looks that asked how much longer this had to go on. We went through all the preliminaries, filled out paperwork with the nurses as they gave us their sympathies.
"Do you want to be with him when it happens?" asked the doctor.
I hadn't planned on being asked that. I figured we would drop him off, say our last goodbyes, and that would be that.
"Yeah," I said. "I don't want him to die alone."
I followed them in to the examination room, stroking Cholito and holding him as he shook in my arms.
"First we give him a sedative," said the doctor. "Do you need some more time?"
I petted him a little more, said things I figured would comfort him if he spoke English, and handed him over. The doctor took Cholito in her arms and left the room. Five minutes later, she came back, holding a towel upon which he lay limp, a catheter sticking out of his left front forepaw, his little pink tongue sticking out from between his lips. I petted Cholito, pulled gently on his soft ear.
"Can he feel this?" I asked.
"Yeah. It's just to calm him down," said the doctor in a quiet, sympathetic voice. "Just tell us when you're ready."
The little pink tongue flicked lazily.
"Let's go ahead," I said.
The doctor slid the needle gently into the catheter, and I watched the blue chemical in the syringe funnel down into Cholito. The doctor put her stethoscope softly on his ribs, a pained look on her face.
"When their immune systems get this low, they just go in no time," she said. "Would you like to be alone with him for a little bit."
"Yes, if you don't mind," I said, my voice deformed by held tears. As the doctor left, I bent down over Cholito and whispered in his ear.
"Off you go, my boy," I said. "Off you go to meet your Jaguar God. To hunt and explore in strange jungle-gardens which I can only imagine."
I badly wanted to hear that. |
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I recently had the priviledge of corresponding with Maurice Broaddus, a horror writer who maintains an active blog at < [ Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<www.mauricebroaddus.blogspot.com>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] I recently had the priviledge of corresponding with Maurice Broaddus, a horror writer who maintains an active blog at <<www.mauricebroaddus.blogspot.com>>. Mr. Broaddus, in addition to being an articulate and insightful writer, also provides an interesting perspective on the genre as a black Christian in a literary field that is pretty overwhelmingly white and areligious (see his post "How I'm a Christian Horror Writer" for further detail).
If you visit the website above and scroll down a bit, you'll see a letter from none other than your humble narrator on the issue of race, culture and speculative fiction. As it turns out, a massive dispute occurred in fandom (and authordom too) surrounding these very issues. What started as an LJ post by author Elizabeth Bear on "how to write the Other" became a shitstorm of unprecendented proportions that blew up this past January and still lingers in the cyber-consciousness. Ideas like white priviledge and cultural appropriation entered the fray. But the basic questions (not surprisingly) remained unresolved. Six months late, I'm going to shoot my mouth off.
First of all, on "Writing the Other." I think Ms. Bear's intentions were honorable. In the blog, she stated that if she writes a character of an ethnicity different from her own, she'll ask friends if she "got it right." What's "getting it right?" I'm of Jewish descent, but as a patrilineal half-Jew, my upbringing and attitude are going to be substantially different from an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Who among us is to say who "got it right?" My friend Alex Collier describes this as "the fallacy of monoliths"--the belief that there is a single Jewish experience, black experience, white experience, gay experience, etc.
And for that matter, who's "the Other?" When I hear a term like "the Other," I'm inclined to imagine some Cthulhoid horror from beyond space-time, not somebody who's black or Latin or Asian or Muslim. It's a term that reeks of inhumanity. I guess terms like "the Other" are academic tropes, but they obfuscate more than they reveal. If you want to judge on racial terms, my "Other" should be the Indians in "Mr. Incan Empire," the samurai in "Selected Views of Mt.Fuji, With Dinosaurs," or the Mexican cabbie in "Caramula." But I didn't view those characters as "Others" when I wrote them. They were just people from a different culture, not some incomprehensible group of alien foreigners. Did I "get them wrong?" It just felt like writing other people to me. Samurai who have fought dinosaurs and feel I misrepresented them are hereby invited to correct me.
Most of the characters I write aren't white people in the pale-skinned, WASPy sense. I don't know why--it's not that I don't think white people have a valid culture of their own, or that we're "boring." It's not even that I think life as an Aztec or samurai was particularly "exotic" for those who lived it day-to-day. Other cultures just interest me--other stories, other lifeways, other ways of viewing the world. So what about cultural appropriation? Am I guilty?
First off, where does the line of cultural appropriation get drawn? Is rock music cultural appropriated, being a musical form originating in black culture? What about the current hip hop craze? If I write a haiku, am I stealing Japanese identity? Mr. Broaddus posted a letter he received from a woman of mixed Caribbean/Indian descent who questioned whether white people are the only ones who are ever guilty of cultural appropriation. An excellent essay by Pam Noles, entitled "Shame", points out that we live in such a global world that cultural interest and race may no longer be synonymous. Thus, we get white kids who love rap, black kids who love manga, and Asian kids who are classically-trained pianists. Personally, I don't think any of this qualifies as cultural appropriation. This is the kind of fascination with the new that occurs in any multi-cultural society. So where does it get bad?
In college, my friend Alex (yep, same Alex mentioned above) took an anthropology class together in which the teacher told us that that Sunday, Blackfoot dancers would be performing in the gymnasium. We were pretty excited about that--after all, Blackfoot dancing isn't the kind of thing you get to see every day in a mostly white liberal arts college in Wisconsin.
When we showed up, there were five dancers, and none of them were Indian. Evidently, some Milwaukee boy scouts had gotten their merit badges by learning Blackfoot dancing, but it was being sold as the real thing. Alex and I left after five minutes.
That was cultural appropriation, and it was pretty sad to watch. And I don't think it's just a white phenomenon. When Afrocentrists claim that ancient Egypt and Olmec Mexico were "black civilizations" that's cultural appropriation, too. It can be a religious thing--just look at all the Evangelicals who have suddenly decided to keep kosher and learn Hebrew because Jesus was Jewish. The bottom line is this: are you interested in a culture because you really are, or to fill gaps you perceive in your own?
White people don't need to pretend to be Indian to be proud of their heritage--German, English and French are perfectly valid ethnicities too. Black people don't need to lay untenable claims to Egypt and the Olmecs when they have Songhai, Mali, Benin, Mossi, Ethiopia, Great Zimbabwe, Kongo, Zululand, Zanzibar and Nubia, a sister-civilization of Egypt that really was predominately black and really did conquer its more well-known Nilotic neighbor. (This isn't to say that Egypt was totally divorced from sub-Saharan Africa, just that the main of Egyptian society was not black.)
The charge of cultural appropriation in speculative fiction is not an unfounded one. I once read a book by Mercedes Lackey entitled "Burning Water" in which Tezcatlipoca, highest knowable god of the Aztec pantheon, was portrayed as a knife-wielding slasher who ran around sacrificing people. He could possess Indians and Mexicans because of their "old blood." That's cultural appropriation too. It infuriated me.
Am I guilty? "Mr. Incan Empire" posits the pre-Columbian tribes and empires of the Americas as industrialized nations in a bizarre modernity filled with high technology, shamanism, ancient gods, and gangsters. The mythology in it draws from Jewish and Amerindian sources, and I feel no need to apologize for that. One of the main themes of the novel is syncretism. "Mr. Incan Empire" is about globalism, albeit done differently. Instead of Americans fascinated by Japan, we might have Europeans imitating Aztec culture. Indian car brands get named after obscure European tribes and leaders (one of my main character's gangster associates drives a "2004 Charlemagne") and the "Church of the New World" ministers to true believers in an Indian Christ called "Jezuz Nose Lord."
I write what I feel compelled to, but I've also traveled enough to realize that though cultures may change, people are, in fact, still people. We have the same fears, jealousies, hopes, capacity for love, ambition, good and evil. That's not PC dogma, that's what I've witnessed. Want to write the Other? Do your research, by all means. A Korean will have a different cultural surrounding than a Swede or a Khoisan. But they'll all be human. There shouldn't be anything incomprehensible about that.
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Hey everybody. I'm devoting the bulk of my blogging time now to my MySpace page, < [ Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<www.myspace.com/jaguargods>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] Hey everybody. I'm devoting the bulk of my blogging time now to my MySpace page, <<www.myspace.com/jaguargods>>. Sorry if the link doesn't connect--just cut and paste. I hope all is well with you and please tell me how things are going.
--Hunter |
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I'm just writing a quick note to let all of you know that a short story I wrote, "Caramula" is going to be published in "City Slab" magazine. "City Slab" is a high quality, full-color, glossy magazine devoted to urban horror. The editor said he liked "Caramula's" international atmosphere. After total rejection by "Cemetery Dance," this was a pretty awesome moment, which I celebrated by jumping around the house and swearing in disbelief for about twenty minutes. My confidence bolstered, I'm writing two new short stories. One has a feudal Japanese setting, and the other is the first piece of medieval fantasy I've written in years. It has no elves in it whatsoever. Hope all is well with you.
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The second draft of the novel is done. Jewish Aztecs, Stuffed Darwin, Incan male models--they're all included. All I have to do now is revise it, and then it should be ready to go. My friend Vince told me to forget agents, that you're much better off marketing the book yourself. Personally, I'm not so sure. The literary market changes constantly, and I'm not confident in my skills at keeping abreast of its latest developments. I'd gladly take 85% of something rather than 100% of nothing. Currently I'm working on a short story entitled "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, With Dinosaurs." I won't give away the plot, but suffice it to say, this may be the pulpiest thing I've ever written. I'm also applying for jobs in publishing houses, which I feel might be a more natural fit for my past work and school experiences than teaching. Today I run "Call of Cthulhu" for some friends of mine. Thus far they've escaped Tcho-Tcho tribesmen in Thailand, heroin-dealing warlords in Burma and the spawn of Shub-Niggurath. This has led them to the subways of New York City, where things will only get much, much worse. Already we've had one casualty (art student/tour guide in jeep drives into minefield while trying to escape extraterrene monstrosity) and one instance of insanity (hardened mob killer sees Tcho-Tchos eating dead bodies and goes psychotic). I expect there will be many, many more. And your fact for the day? The Piraha tribe of Brazil is a group of 350-some hunter-gatherers whose language is so anomalous that it's causing linguists to question the very principles of human speech. The Piraha don't have terms for numbers or colors, and have only three vowels and nine consonants in their language. The uses of tonality, however, are exceptionally complex. Oftentimes entire words can be reduced to one syllable, or just to tones. Piraha isn't unique in this latter regard, actually, because Zapotec, another tonal Indian language, has several dialects wherein one can "whistle" entire sentences. What does make Piraha unique is that their culture is so tied to their language that they can't be taught to count in other languages. Furthermore, all known languages can combine concepts into sentences. For instance "Hunter was LJing" and "Hunter should have been cleaning the kitty boxes" can be combined in all known languages into "Hunter was LJing while he should have been cleaning the kitty boxes." Except in Piraha. The Piraha have been demonstrated to be free from inbreeding and in many ways exceptionally intelligent, but their language and culture is fascinatingly distinct from anything linguists previously considered possible. This fact comes from an article in the current issue of the "New Yorker." I highly recommend it.
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Kitchen Table |
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Beth and I went to see "Grindhouse" last night with several friends. For those who don't know, "Grindhouse" is a Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature that attempts to recapture the feel of '70's-era exploitation films down to the grainy footage, fake "prevues" and ads for refreshments.
Rodriguez's film starts with a preview for a Mexploitation action epic called "Machete" starring the immortal Danny Trejo. The movie itself, "Planet Terror" has everything a nerdy horror fan could want in terms of gore, mutations, boobs, and gun fights. Rose McGowan stars as Cherry, a gogo dancer who, after being mutilated by zombies is given a prosthetic machine-gun leg by her boyfriend Wray (Freddy Rodriguez). Naveen Andrews of "Lost" fame plays a smaller but important role as a renengade Afghan scientist with the secret of the zombie plague and a penchant for castration, and Tom Savini and Bruce Willis both appear in minor but memorable roles.
For me at least, "Planet Terror" captured everything there is to love about b-horror. There's eye candy for all genders, humor, grossness, and even a little something Mayan. The theater we saw it in was filled with people who were laughing out loud, whispering to each other, and groaning at the severed zombie bits. I'm ordinarily not a fan of audience participation in movie theaters, but here it worked perfectly, because the movie itself was such a spectacle. I've read that this collaborative project was Tarantino's idea, but Rodriguez's movie comes much closer to the spirit of exploitation horror as I understand it. It's just guilty but knowing fun, homage and satire.
The same can't really be said for Tarantino's film, "Death-Proof," which stars Kurt Russell as a psychotic stuntman who likes to kill young women with his souped-up "death-proof" car. "Death-Proof" just kind of rambles. You get your obligatory "people sitting around in a coffee shop, pontificating about pop-culture" scene. You get your Tarantinean forty minutes of dead time where the characters sit around like a bad Seinfeld episode, talking about the intricacies of foot rubs and '70's TV shows. It wasn't especially interesting in "Pulp Fiction," and it's not especially interesting now. The much-vaunted "best car chase ever," while fun, is distressingly short. Plot points (like the fate of an entire character) are dropped in favor of more "cool" dialogue.
I'm no opponent of dialogue, it's just that I think most of Tarantino's is superfluous and self-indulgent. It's not that "Death-Proof" has nothing worthwhile. Kurt Russell is a fun villain, and stuntwoman Zoe Bell is pretty awesome as, well, stuntwoman Zoe Bell. But the spirit of exploitation b-cinema just isn't there. It just gets weighed down in the distended, dripping mass that is Tarantino's ego. Go see "Grindhouse" for "Planet Terror," for the previews, for the cheap-looking '70's fast food advertisements. But if you leave before "Death-Proof," you're not missing anything that can't wait for DVD. |
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So, after significant trouble (don't ask), the coffee shop formerly known as Due Gatti has reopened as the Three-Legged Dog Cafe. It basically has the same people working for it, in the same building, but it has different management. It's a long story.
In other news, I haven't met my April 1st deadline for finishing the rough draft of the novel, but I'm closing in on the end of it, so it shouldn't be too much longer. The search for teaching jobs isn't going as well as I would like, but I guess if I don't get one now, I can always go to graduate school.
So there we stand. I'm thinking a lot about D&D (nerd!) because it takes my mind off the novel. I never thought I'd want a break from Mesoamerica, but weirdly enough, I do. Granted, novel 2 is going to go back to the same world (this time from the perspective of a literally faceless Aztec hit man in the gritty streets of Tenochtitlan, but I need a break right now.
In other news, did you know that rats can laugh? It doesn't sound like human laughter, but it's a vocal response they give when engaging in pleasurable activities, like playing or having sex. Rats can laugh. Think about that. That's fucking terrifying. They already can chew through pipes, reflect on their actions and decisions, and have a penchant for eating babies. Rats are horrifying.
(This fact courtesy of Wikipedia, the 21st century's Holy Grail of knowledge.)
And they spread Black Death and Hanta virus. Absolutely motherfucking horrifying. |
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Briefly put, this series rocks. HBO has such a talent for shows about Italians scheming against and killing each other. Maybe next they'll do something about the DiMedicis and Renaissance Italy.
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The Forum |
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satisfied |
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Reedy Flutes | |
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I haven't posted in a long time, except for a rant about "Apocalypto." A quick summation follows. After working at the Hotel, I briefly got a job at a bank, as a full-time teller. After about a month or so, I realized the job wasn't right for me and quit, but didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life aside from write. I knew I certainly did not want to work another dead-end clerical job, so I began to consider various options. I decided I really didn't want to go to graduate school, or get a job as an editor or journalist. After much thought, I decided to pursue a career as a teacher, and began applying to jobs at independent schools across the country. Thus far, I've had one interview for a high school English position in Georgia (rural Georgia) and I have another interview this afternoon with a woman representing a Quaker school in Ohio. Meanwhile, I have been writing everyday, working on draft two of the Stuffed Darwin novel. It is now c. 60,000 words worth of convoluted satire/alternate history/dark fantasy action. Moreover, a writer friend of mine recently alerted me that there is no rule that says your novel has to be finished before you start querying publishers. Since publication sounds generally awesome, I'm going to retool chapters 1 and 2 in a few weeks and begin sending them out to selected publishing houses. Right now I've got my eye on a small press called Night Shade books. Egypt was amazing. Check out Beth's LJ for pictures of our adventures in the Black Land (and the Red Land, for all you nerds). I'll keep you all posted further on everything.
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Kitchen |
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contemplative |
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The hum of the refrigerator. | |
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Mel Gibson isn't just an anti-semitic bigot. He's an anti-semitic bigot with a ridiculously inaccurate vision of Mayan culture, religion, and society. Yes, children, I've seen "Apocalypto," and the results were not pretty. The film tells the story of Jaguar Paw, a Mayan hunter of the early 1500's who lives an idealized hunter-gatherer life in a small village somewhere in Yucatan. Jaguar Paw's clan spend their hours hunting, telling stories, having sex, uttering terse proverbs about the importance of bravery, and generally being your iconic Noble Savages until one day, unexpectedly, a group of "Holcanes" (the term refers to bands of Mayan mercenaries and should actually be pluralized as "Holcanob") arrives to rape and sack their village, carrying men and women alike off to be sacrificed in a large, unnamed Mayan city. Our hero manages to escape after nearly being sacrificed, and what happens next is a little like "The Fugitive" in Mesoamerica. I can forgive minor inaccuracies, don't get me wrong. If the spirit of "Apocalypto" was in the right place, I could forgive the fact that, say, the Holcanes run around in jewelry, loincloths and not much else (realistically they'd wear cotton armor) or that the anonymous Mayan city has stelae (which the Maya were no longer erecting in the 1500's), but Apocalypto's message is manifestly not in accord with the historical reality of life in immediately pre-contact Yucatan. Nobody lived in quaint little hunter-gatherer villages, blissfully unaware of the existence of large city-states and practicing no agriculture. Upon first sighting the city of their captors, one of Jaguar Paw's imprisoned brothers says, "Cities of stone--we have heard legends of places like this." In reality, a small village such as the one in which the characters live would probably be a satellite of a large city-state and might even have a few of those marvellous stone buildings of its own. The people would almost certainly also be aware of the existence of large, powerful nations in Central Mexico, such as the Aztec Empire. They would not have lived the idealized, pseudo-Amazonian, hunter-gatherer lifestyle Gibson portrays. Then there's human sacrifice, the lynchpin of the film. Gibson portrays a psychotic, clawed (?) Mayan priest gleefully ripping the hearts out of captives and spouting shibboleths about the bloodthirst of the gods. Below him stand the multitudes, zombie-like in their obedience. The problem here is that both in spirit and appearance, Mel has gotten his Khmer Rouge and his Maya mixed up. This is especially apparent in a scene in which Jaguar Paw, fleeing the city, runs through a cornfield and stumbles into a ditch. Looking up, he sees that the ditch is filled headless corpses. Anyone who's seen "The Killing Fields" is perfectly justified in recalling the scene in which Dith Pran, fleeing through a rice patty, stumbles into a ditch and realizes it's full of decaying bodies. What's really wrong with this entire scheme is that human sacrifice was a vital part of life in Mesoamerica. It was intricately woven into ideas about religion, the state, warfare, and the very continued existence of the world. The idea of human sacrifice would not have been a surprise (as it is to Jaguar Paw and his fellow villagers). It would have been viewed as a duty, the price of keeping time and space in their proper course and a prevention of horrors far worse. Human sacrifice wasn't an act committed out of cackling, cynical evil, and it wasn't murder. It was exactly that--sacrifice--unpleasant, but necessary. Mel Gibson has claimed that "Apocalypto" is his commentary on the war in Iraq, spouting trivial nonsense about how civilizations turn to human sacrifice in their decline. Better heads than mine have pointed out that the Maya did not just begin practicing human sacrifice late in their history, during their so-called decline, and that the Aztecs sacrificed people at the height of their empire. It's true, of course, but what I think is behind "Apocalypto" is something much older than the Iraq War. When the Spaniards first set out for the New World, Europe had certain philosophies regarding what constituted an "innocent" and therefore Edenic native. Namely, no idolatry, no eating of human flesh, and no wearing of clothing. Thus, hasty explorers proclaimed the peaceful Tainos of Hispaniola, who fulfilled these requirements, as being heirs to the Garden. As Europeans explored further, encountering groups such as the Maya, Aztecs, and Iroquois, these ideas necessarily changed, sometimes secularized into the concept of the Noble Savage. The Spanish believed that the Indians had souls--that had been papally established in 1496--but Indian culture had corrupted those souls, necessitating forceful conversions. In Gibson's film, Jaguar Paw's village fulfills all those ideas about "innocent natives." The people there don't worship idols, go to war or eat human flesh. They wear little clothing, and the women go bare-breasted (the Maya did not do this). By contrast, the city, steeped in a multi-millennial cultural tradition, is pure evil. The ending message? The Maya deserved it for their barbarity, but only the city-dwelling ones. Or, as they said of the Indian schools of the 1950's, "Kill the Indian, save the man." Gibson's thesis, to my mind, has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with attitudes prevalent in the sixteenth century. With "Apocalypto," he truly proves himself the scion of an ultra-conservative, old-fashioned, and unthinking form of religious doctrine the world has long since passed by.
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