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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Perhaps the strident intensification of rhetoric by African-American leaders (such as Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus), which began in Florida, is partly related to last year's controversy in Miami over Elian Gonzalez when demographic projections were publicized showing that Hispanics as a minority group, in Florida and nationwide, are surpassing the black population in size, wealth and influence. One benefit of Bush's appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor is that they are sophisticated role models for international thinking (Rice tackled Russian in school). With their rote claims of victimization and increasing demand for reparations, too many black leaders are defining their people at the lowest common denominator and unproductively binding their identities to the remote past of the slavery era.
Linda Chavez, Bush's fleeting nominee for Secretary of Labor, may be yesterday's news, but I'll add my two cents in case conservatives foolishly try to make her a martyr to political correctness. Chavez is a smart, skillful syndicated columnist and TV commentator who because of her acid views and intermittent administrative career was probably not an ideal candidate for a Cabinet post. She was rightly booted when she failed to be candid with her job interviewer about potential problems in her personal history.
Chavez then had a great chance to demonstrate her character and competence by making a graceful withdrawal announcement. Instead, her press conference last week was a fiasco -- narcissistic, sanctimonious and manipulative (with people props shipped in to sing her praises). By bemoaning her hard life and exploiting even her parents' auto accident as tear-jerking material, Chavez damaged not only her own reputation but that of professional women in general. Until women go cold turkey on all these quavering "feelings," no one will ever vote them into the White House to command the armed forces. Women need more salt and vinegar and less rancid honey.
The talking heads of American TV seem even more trivial than usual this month since my partner Alison and I spent the holidays in Mexico, where the Mesoamerican ruins give one a breathtaking historical perspective. On the last day of 2000, we were at the seaside Mayan ruin of Tulum, and on the first day of 2001, most propitiously, we were at the great complex of Chichin Itza in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula.
Tulum, dating from the 12th to the 16th centuries A.D., is a vast, walled compound dominated by a pylon-like temple on a high cliff overlooking the Caribbean. The surf, swirling among gigantic boulders on the white sand below, is an unearthly turquoise. In natural drama, Tulum (a shrine of the Descending God oriented toward the rising sun) rivals the Temple of Poseidon crowning Cape Sunium in Greece.
Photographs do not do justice to the sprawling site of Chichin Itza (covering 6 square miles). While the imposing stepped pyramid of Kukulcan (Mayan for Quetzalcsatl, the plumed serpent) is the primary monument, the dozens of other major buildings are astonishing. Furthermore, the graceful placement of temples and the long sightlines (particularly from the Caracol or Astronomical Observatory) sometimes felt curiously modern. I couldn't help but reflect ruefully on the clutter of the Roman Forum, jammed between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, or on the cramped relationship of the Propylaea and Erechtheum to the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis.
Other highlights at Chichin Itza were the ritual ball court, nearly twice the size of a football field, and the nearby Platform of the Skulls, where victims' decapitated heads were exhibited. The platform is wrapped with four tiers of bold bas-relief squares of grinning skulls still red with original paint. Another unforgettable sight was the overgrown stone ramp, broken in two places centuries ago by the collapse of limestone caverns, leading to the edge of the huge Xtoloc (lizard) cenote, a natural well, where the first migrants may have settled at Chichin as early as 500 B.C.
The Platform of the Skulls in particular, which would clearly fascinate young people, reinforced my conviction, based on teaching experience, that the embattled field of archaeology (often accused of imperialism) should be at the heart of the classroom curriculum at both the primary and secondary levels. Archaeology is an ideal way to synthesize history, art, religion and science. It centers on physical objects and their conservation and shows how to reason from fragmentary evidence. Archaeology, in short, offers splendid practical and intellectual training.
One of my many criticisms of the smart set currently ruling the roost in the humanities departments of the elite schools is that their command of world history and thought is pathetically weak. (This is true even among the so-called New Historicists.) Their cultural commentary is patchy and chaotic because their methodology is purely literary. That is, they play Scrabble with their haphazard, undigested material, which is cut up, whirled around and overlaid with cutesy or pretentious verbal formulas whose provenance is simply the insular conference circuit of the past two decades.
Many of today's best graduate students are getting their degrees without ever having encountered a genuinely erudite professor in the humanities. The rampant careerism of American academe, which puts a premium on patter, hustling and networking, has yet to be seriously examined. It has had devastating consequences on education by driving free-thinking graduate students and junior faculty out of the profession. When learning is no longer a criterion for employment and promotion, both teaching and scholarship suffer.
My personal reading list, needless to say, never includes current literary theorists, who are as inconsequential as mayflies. Instead I occupy myself with books like Graham Connah's densely detailed "African Civilizations," published by Cambridge University Press in 1987. The subtitle of this book, which I recently finished reading, is "Precolonial cities and states in tropical Africa: an archaeological perspective."
Connah, an Australian professor of archaeology and prehistory who has conducted excavations in Benin, argues for the strictly indigenous origins of the major achievements of early Africa. Among the geographical and climatic zones he examines are the West African savanna, the West African forest, the Middle Nile, the Ethiopian Highlands, the East African Coast and the Zimbabwe Plateau.
"African Civilizations" contains the kind of basic detail that should be the foundation for all speculation about history but that is glaringly missing or amateurishly mishandled by today's poorly prepared humanities professors, who indiscriminately apply hackneyed poststructuralist theory to everything. Connah rightly connects the growth of social stratification and centralized authority to economic development: coordinated planning is essential for irrigation systems, the gathering of resources and physical materials for building projects, and the collection and distribution of products. Food surpluses raise the standard of living and allow the arts and sciences to flourish.
