The crowning and concluding — and summarizing — visit of our Interpreter Foundation educational tour to Mexico and Guatemala was to Mexico City’s magnificent Museo Nacional de Antropología after church on Sunday afternoon. The museum offers a beautifully-arranged and admirably-displayed collection of artifacts, both real and replicated, from the various nations and periods of the Pre-Columbian history of Mexico. And not only from Mexico, but from the territory of other modern nations in the region — or, anyway, at least from Guatemala. It is a spectacular museum. We spent several hours there, but several days would be required to do it even minimal justice. Perhaps the most famous object in the collection is the massive Aztec calendar stone, but I saw many other familiar objects that often appear in books.
This was my first time in the Museo Nacional de Antropología since I first went there at the age of seventeen. Curiously, although I have few if any real memories of it from that youthful visit, I remembered the look of the main entrance very clearly.
Incidentally, I was amused during the tour to catch a few of the comments about it from the Peterson Obsession Board. There was a sort of competition among a few of the enthusiasts there to express the most indignant outrage regarding the tour. (Such competitions are a recurrent feature at the POB.) I was, it was suggested, hastily fleeing indignant donors who had given to Six Days in August. (Of course, the tour — and my involvement in it — had been scheduled many, many months ago, long before the film’s release date had been set. And at least a few of those donors were in the tour group.) My silence for several days of the tour wasn’t actually due to a mysterious computer failure, as I have claimed, but rather to my desire to escape the wrath of those whom I had defrauded or, anyway, whose money I had squandered on yet another of my interminable series of personal vanity projects. Either the Interpreter Foundation or I myself was profiting handsomely off of the folks in the tour group. (In fact, neither I nor the Interpreter Foundation will profit so much as a penny from the trip.) My favorite accusation, though, is probably the claim that our tour was a “racist, colonialist project” to steal and distort the real cultures of Mesoamerica. This particular gem was contributed by my Malevolent Stalker, who has not yet found an evil that he is unwilling to ascribe to me. (He recently asserted, for example, that, however much I may protest otherwise, I admire the Nazis — particularly for their historical willingness and ability to murder those who disagree with them.)
The reasoning behind that charge, that the Interpreter Foundation’s educational tour to Guatemala and Mexico, if reasoning it can really be called — it seems actually to be merely an expression of personal hostility to Y’r Obdt Servant, blended (whether ingenuously or, more likely, disingenuously) with some form or another of leftish anti-Westernism — was racist and colonialist apparently runs as follows: The wicked Latter-day Saints are trying to impose their ideological model of Nephites and Lamanites and Mulekites and Jaredites upon the native peoples of Mesoamerica, who are, thereby, being deprived of their own indigenous story.
I doubt, though, that anybody faulting the Latter-day Saints for such “cultural imperialism” is equally exercised about the theories of contemporary archaeologists and anthropologists, which, by and large, don’t tend to support the Aztec creation myth (the so-called Legend of the Fifth Sun), according to which the world had been created and destroyed four times before. Does modern historical and archaeological scholarship really endorse the Maya creation story that credits six deities, covered in green and blue feathers and floating in the primordial waters, with the creation of the Earth? Do contemporary archaeologists and anthropologists believe that those six gods planted a tall ceiba tree in order to make space for all life and to separate Sky from Earth? Does current anthropological theory support the idea that the roots of that primordial ceiba tree penetrated deep into the nine levels of the Maya Underworld and reached up through the thirteen levels of the Maya Upper-world? Do contemporary scholars teach, as fact, that, in the beginning, only Tawa, the Sun God, and Spider Woman, the Earth Goddess, existed? Has evolutionary theory made room for the claim that Tawa and Spider Woman created the world by singing the First Magic Song and then willing life into existence? Aren’t modern scholars and scientists effectively subverting indigenous cultures and traditions with their own ideas? How does this not make them racist and colonialist cultural imperialists by the apparent standards of at least one deep thinker on the Obsession Board? (Hint: The salient fact is probably just this: Such scholars and scientists aren’t typically named Dan Peterson. Accordingly, they get a pass.)
After I’ve led a tour of Israel or Egypt or some other location in the Middle East, I typically don’t want to read or watch anything related to the region during the flights home. For a day or two, I don’t want to think about the subject any more. In fact, I want something very, very different. With that in mind, I started reading Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle on the flight from Mexico City to Dallas/Fort Worth.
For those who are unfamiliar with it, the novel is set in the former United States of America after the defeat of the Allies by the Axis powers. The Empire of Japan controls the nominally independent satellite state that controls the Pacific coast of North America, while the Third Reich controls the eastern seaboard.
As of this moment, I’ve just reached the point in the story where Reichskanzler Martin Bormann, who had succeeded Adolf Hitler when Hitler went insane from syphilis, has died. Now, other leaders outside the Reich are trying to divine who is most likely to succeed to the leadership of Germany’s empire. Hermann Göring (aka “Goering”) is a leading candidate. So is Joseph Goebbels. As is Reinhard Heydrich. (In the counterfactual history of the novel, Heinrich Himmler had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1948.)
It reminds me of the incessant stories coming across my news feed about who is currently leading whom nationally, in Iowa, in the battleground states, and so forth. Will Kamala Harris win? Will Donald Trump win? I’m tired of hearing about the-election-as-horserace. I’m very grateful to have been out of the United States for the past two weeks. May it soon all be over!
Posted from Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas
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