When Worlds Collide
O'ROURKE, P.J.
When Worlds Collide The American past meets modern museum doctrine. BY P.J. O’ROURKE The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a new permanent exhibit of savagery and barbarism, “The...
...Nipples seem to have been vague and smudgy in ancient times, and a mastodon or giant ground sloth was always getting in between mural viewers and your genitals...
...The savages and barbarians are the museum’s curators...
...The brontosaurus has been pushed to the back (that is to say the front) of the main hall and isn’t called a brontosaurus anymore...
...that Europeans brought to America’s Indigenous peoples, “Religious Conversion...
...It isn’t...
...No one is ever so poor that he can’t pick up his yard...
...The Inca seem to have been skilled cartoonists in the Wallace and Gromit manner...
...The back door has more room for tour buses and handicapped ramps...
...They did their share of nasty stuff...
...Being one, I looked for the exit to go fi nd a drink...
...Gallery guides available in Spanish only,” reads another wall inscription...
...One of the best pleasures of my childhood was to walk hand-in-hand with my grandmother up the broad fl ights of marble steps to the towering bronze doors of the Field Museum...
...Now wait a damn minute, you infi - del apes of social science...
...Dim corridors were lined with dioramas featuring important animals, shot, stuffed, and carefully labeled...
...Then comes a prolix wall headed “Powerful Leaders...
...Who were they...
...How surprising...
...ner, lest someone somehow take offense...
...Whatever steadiness of nerve I now possess I owe to steeling myself to walk past the display case containing an unwrapped Egyptian mummy...
...no Buddhist ever has, and no Hindu since the days of suttee and the Thugs...
...That is the difference—perhaps the only difference—between civilization and savagery...
...None seems afraid to walk past the mummy case...
...And Grandma had visited the Field Museum during the Columbian Exposition...
...At least people are still dressed the way I was a half-century ago: In jeans or shorts, T-shirts, and gym shoes...
...Ancient Americans have attained the honored, illustrious status of chumps and fall guys...
...Of course, if they’re the same as you and me, why do they need a room in a museum any more than we do...
...But that’s not-progress for you...
...From mild bloodletting to violent death, sacrifi ce offered thanks to the gods while maintaining the natural order of the world...
...The Field Museum was interesting even in its least interesting parts...
...Theodore...
...An offi ce cubicle’s space is allotted to the Moundbuilders...
...Further corridors held wonders of a sterner kind: Sinister masks from Africa, demon deities of the heathen Raj, alarming Sung Dynasty fi gurines depicting the exquisite tortures of Chinese hell...
...Nearby is a large mural titled “Eastern Woodlands 2500 B.C.-500 B.C...
...Shut your brie holes and listen up...
...Even today almost all world religions include sacrifi ce of some kind in their spiritual practices...
...Then Grandmother and I would go to lunch in the museum’s cafeteria, an austere room that served school food of the better kind—much as the White House Mess does to this day...
...The economic boom didn’t extend to casual wear and sports clothes...
...At the portal of the “Ancient Americas” exhibit is the fi rst of many, many wall inscriptions telling you what you should be thinking, if you happen to do any of that...
...Grandma, what’s wrong with the people in the bad neighborhoods that we saw from the ‘El...
...The fourth grade classroom’s bookshelves overfl ow with culturally sensitive and ecologically aware retellings of Potawatomi, Paiute, and Kickapoo legends, colorfully illustrated by women who use birds or mammals for their last names...
...I wandered into a solemn, quiet, awe-engendering place...
...Mao Zedong, please go to the white courtesy phone...
...The ancient Americans’ modern relations are regular folks, as well as their ancestors were, and with clothes on, too, the same as you and me...
...Besides the wall inscriptions the exhibit is cluttered with innumerable video screens displaying people yakking in native languages described as nearly extinct...
...Nor is the skeleton of this vast vegan any longer engaged in post mortem mortal combat with the bones of a tyrannosaurus rex...
...Grandma, which Roosevelt was worse, Teddy or Franklin...
...All of creation’s wonders were on display in orderly ranks...
...An encomium to the Ice Age hunter-gatherers follows...
...The Spanish often emphasized accounts of bloodthirsty sacrifi ce to justify conquering the Aztec people...
...What information is conveyed thereby, and to whom, is an open question...
...The message of the movie is, I think, to build a wigwam, wear a hula skirt, and boil some sticks for dinner...
...Democrats rent...
...At the Field Museum, the bygone aboriginal inhabitants of our hemisphere are shown to be regular folks, the same as you and me, although usually more naked and always more noble...
...They lived strange, spectacular lives on strange, spectacular continents untrod by man and more remote for them than Mars—or the world of museum curation—is for us...
...State Societies are, it seems, all societies in which sticks and grass aren’t the principal constituents of housing, wardrobe, and diet...
...Under one such painting the inscription reads: “Look at that mammoth,” your aunt cries out as you hike downhill towards a vast plain...
...sacrifi ce has played a role in the religious beliefs of many people throughout history and in all parts of the world...
...I would bow my head and intone, “Praise God for not making me an Eskimo...
...Knock me over with a feather...
...The Field Museum was built for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, celebrating (if you can imagine celebrating such a thing) Columbus’s “discovery” of America...
...It was a solemn, quiet, awe-engendering place...
...Anthropologists don’t fully know the difference between right and wrong...
...Why did they build the mounds...
...Most of the minerals and all of the useful woods have been replaced by a gift shop the size of Macy’s (appropriately enough, since Macy’s is now the name on Marshall Field’s, the department store whose founder was the Field Museum’s patron...
...However, claymation lacks something when it isn’t animated...
...The doors are closed now...
...Give the “Ancient Americas” exhibit back to the ancient Americans, and the Field Museum along with it...
...For the fi rst time,” the narration drones, “the ruling class had a different standard of living than others...
...The ancient Americans themselves are not portrayed as savage or barbarous...
...This led to periods of confl ict with their neighbors...
...This brings us to the Maya and their abominable customs, nicely glossed...
...The ancient Americans weren’t regular folks...
...Doubtless offense was taken by Chicago’s BrontoAmerican community...
...Or maybe the message is to pack the car and move to North Korea...
...I live in a house cluttered with twig and Play-Doh models of hogans, longhouses, and wickiups, hung with ill-made “dream-catchers” and strewn with poorly glued miniature birch bark canoes shedding birch bark on the rugs...
...Living in a State Society” offers a different defi nition of civilization...
...a McDonald’s has been installed...
...Over this comforting fare I would quiz my own family’s ancient American...
...The Ancient Americas is a story of diversity and change—not progress...
...I looked at the full-scale cutaway of winter quarters in MacKenzie Bay, where you lived in an underground room the size of a Buick, wore itchy seal skins, ate raw whale and breathed the smoke of a Caribou chip fi re...
...And given our umbrage-fi lled presidential campaign, maybe it is...
...When I was in the fourth grade, some 50 years ago, my grandmother would take me to the Field Museum...
...The sculpture of a Masai spearman facing off against a crouching lioness has been shunted to a lonely corP.J...
...Second is “Disease,” which should stir our sympathy but hardly clausour guilt...
...The museum is full of noisy children and their caregivers, blended families, and whatever else we’re calling kith and kin these days...
...Inscriptions also give a nod to media hype...
...A long, mouse-maze, airport security-style line must be endured to get tickets...
...Grandeur is out of style anyway...
...WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE In 1492, the fi rst European explorers arrived in the Americas, triggering a devastating loss of life almost inconceivable to us today...
...Therefore, the horrors that beset The Ancient Americas following 1492 would have happened if the Ni?a, the Pinta, and the Santa Mar?a had been manned by Jimmy Carter, the Dalai Lama, and Bono...
...Therefore, the “periods of confl ict” didn’t result in anything like, oh, members of the Iroquois Confederation capturing, torturing, enslaving, and occasionally eating everyone they could get their hands on...
...You’re hustled past the Inca’s no doubt better-justifi ed conquerings...
...The men [sic!] did well . . .” Your family and other group members pause to give thanks and honor the mammoth whose life was taken . . . The Americas were peopled, presciently, by future Californians...
...You enter a hushed and funereal room with tombstone lettering on black walls...
...This is “Living Descendants...
...McKinley died, and he divided the Republican party, allowing that scallywag Woodrow Wilson to become the president...
...The original New World Order, as it were...
...The world was full of things and—if I could summon the patience and concentration—those things could be organized, understood, and made to serve a purpose...
...It wasn’t the happiest 400th anniversary for ancient Americans...
...Well, “despite centuries of injustice and oppression, today’s “Indigenous peoples strive to sustain their cultural traditions...
...O’Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...And the large, gloomy hall devoted to life in the Arctic was a religious inspiration...
...After a twist and a turn in the exhibit’s vagrant route you are among the Aztec and Inca...
...You could say the same of the Irish...
...In a nook around the corner from Mayan Spirituality a computer-animated movie runs on a continuous loop...
...Never mind that they were here for 12,000 or 13,000 years before the rest of us showed up with our pistols and pox, so most of their getting shafted was, perforce, a do-it-yourself thing...
...An extensive collection of Inca clay faces appears opposite the “not progress” message...
...And also never mind that “The Ancient Americas” exhibit tells you nothing that a fourth grader doesn’t know...
...Ice Age or no, everyone in the talentlessly painted murals is naked...
...The cafeteria is gone...
...The ancient Americans were tough as hell...
...You escape the pity parlor of When Worlds Collide and traverse a space of video screen talking heads and interactive displays with all their buttons being pounded by toddlers...
...1969 when Janis Joplin and Santana Were Performing at Woodstock...
...If any of the heirs and assigns of the Aztec, Inca, or Maya feel inclined to practice a little human sacrifi ce on anthropologists, sociologists, moral relativists, neoMarxists, and other conquistadors of modern academia, call it “maintaining the natural order of the world...
...They plunder history, ravage archaeology, do violence to intelligence, and lay waste to wisdom, faith, and common sense...
...Barack Obama was elected, I guess...
...The section devoted to Useful Varieties of Wood fascinated me in the exactitude of its tediousness...
...they are misbehaving blurs to my bifocaled eyes...
...Was there free parking...
...Why would people want to give up their freedom...
...Or, possibly, the message is to get over it, accept Big Chief Hillary, and learn to love her tax hikes, Iraq retreat, and pseudo-Methodist spiritual beliefs (including health care bloodletting) because “there was no choice...
...Why did people give up power to make some of their own decisions...
...Translated from the academese: “We dunno...
...Translating, again, from the Academese: “Got me, pal...
...The naked people in the Eastern Woodlands “faced growing population and environmental stresses...
...Grandma, what’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans...
...The movie explains that, in a State Society, the “Ruling Classes” are supported by the “State Power Triad” consisting of the Economy, the Military, and Religion...
...I didn’t have the heart...
...The fi rst one upon which we are expected to refl ect is the only decent thing (not counting the wheel, iron, cigarette papers, etc...
...People like us,” it concludes, “prospered in ancient times...
...The museum fueled every worthy ambition...
...Were this a criticism of pre-Columbian societies, you’d be in for an interesting experience...
...The mineralogical collection made me decide to become a man of learning and means suffi cient to lead an expedition to fi nd an immense amethyst geode, which I would present to Jennifer Riley, she of the auburn hair in my fourth grade class, one row over and two desks up...
...My daughter’s bedroom is heaped with the apparel, equipage, and chattel of Kaya, the Native American American Girl doll...
...Looking around the large, gloomy hall I saw the full-scale cutaway of winter quarters in MacKenzie Bay...
...Fortunately, Chief Obama was willing, without diplomatic preconditions, to meet and negotiate with any ancient American leader...
...The Ancient Americas treats this in a moving-rightalong manner...
...For most there was no choice...
...The European infl ictions are grimly illustrated...
...And it’s not just us Christians who say so...
...But even the Aztec don’t deserve to be patronized, demeaned, and insulted by what is—or is supposed to be, or once was—one of the white man’s great institutions of learning...
...Central decision-makers were often more effective than groups at organizing large amounts of labor, managing resources, and directing wars...
...Let’s fi nish that sentence...
...You aren’t...
...The main entrance to the museum is no longer used...
...We did indeed—if your idea of prosperity is fastening a “Clovis people” spearpoint to a stick and stabbing long-horned bison, giant grand sloths, wooly mammoths, mastodons, and New World horses until they were all extinct...
...Modern kids are too loving and caring about dinosaurs to be exposed to such scenes of domestic violence...
...God, the God, the God who didn’t make me an Eskimo, does not require human sacrifi ce, he suffers it: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life...
...I’m a resident of the Eastern Woodlands and, except for fewer naked people, they haven’t changed much...
...and A.D...
...I couldn’t see what the children are wearing...
...From the time of Abraham no monotheist has practiced human sacrifi ce...
...A very wordy inscription details the theories of when and how humans arrived in the New World...
...These days that neoclassical portico with its view of Loop, lakefront, and Grant Park grandeur probably makes people feel small...
...He had no business meddling in things the way he did after your great-grandfather’s friend Mr...
...The text on the Maya continues: Some societies in the ancient Americas, like the Maya, practiced bloodletting or human sacrifi ce as part of their ceremonies or spiritual beliefs...
...Anthropologists don’t fully know...
...The exhibit points out that disease was the chief cause of suffering after European contact...
...Indeed, some are as old as my grandmother was when she, in hat and gloves, escorted me...
...The loathsome Aztec devoted most of their energy to human sacrifi ces, horrifying in extent and gruesome in technique...
...After the Ice Age,” reads another wall, “human creativity made the Americas more culturally diverse...
...O’ROURKE The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a new permanent exhibit of savagery and barbarism, “The Ancient Americas...
...This is either overdoing it with the multiculturalism or an implied insult to the effect that Hispanics are too stupid to fi nd their way through an exhibit arranged like a drunkard’s version of the museum’s ticket line...
...Its labels are curled and yellowing but unchanged: respectful, factual, precise...
...Except these are people of 40 or 50...
...I am the parent of a fourth grader...
...How did they do it...
...Perhaps the title should be amended to “Eastern Woodlands 2500 B.C.-500 B.C...
...Nowadays offense is taken—snatched and grabbed—as if offense were something valuable to own...
...No Taoist, no Confucian, no Zoroastrian, Baha’ist, or Sikh includes murder in his “spiritual practices...
...Unwrapped as he is, the mummy fi ts in too well, sartorially, with a 21st-century crowd...
...The wall inscription proceeds: Here, we refl ect on the magnitude of loss infl icted on America’s Indigenous peoples by European invasion...
...So maybe it was Hillary, not Obama, who got elected...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 37
