Holidays in Heck (24 page)

An extensive collection of Inca clay faces appears opposite the “not progress” message. The Incas seem to have been skilled cartoonists in the Wallace and Gromit manner. However, Claymation lacks something when it isn't animated. But that's not-progress for you.

“Gallery guides available in Spanish only,” reads another wall inscription. This is either overdoing it with multiculturalism or an implied insult to the effect that Hispanics are too stupid to find their way through an exhibit arranged like a drunkard's version of the museum's ticket line.

A very wordy inscription details the theories of when and how humans arrived in the New World. Translated from the Academese: “We dunno.” An encomium to the Ice Age hunter-gatherers follows. “People like us,” it concludes, “prospered in ancient times.” We did indeed—if your idea of prosperity is fastening a “Clovis people” spear point to a stick and stabbing long-horned bison, giant ground sloths, woolly mammoths, mastodons, and New World horses until they were all extinct. The economic boom didn't extend to casual wear and sports clothes. Ice Age or no, everyone in the talentlessly painted murals is naked. 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.

Under one such painting a caption reads:

“Look at that mammoth,” your aunt cries out as you hike downhill toward a vast plain. 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.

“After the Ice Age,” reads another wall, “human creativity made the Americas more culturally diverse.” Barack Obama was elected, I guess.

Nearby is a large mural titled “Eastern Woodlands 2500 BC–500 BC.” I'm a resident of the Eastern Woodlands and, except for fewer naked people, they haven't changed much.
Perhaps the title should be amended to “Eastern Woodlands 2500 BC–500 BC and in AD 1969. When Janis Joplin and Santana Were Performing at Woodstock.” The naked people in the Eastern Woodlands “faced growing population and environmental stresses. This led to periods of conflict with their neighbors.” Fortunately, Chief Obama was willing, without diplomatic preconditions, to meet and negotiate with any ancient American leader. Therefore the “periods of conflict” 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.

An office cubicle's space is allotted to the Mound Builders. Who were they? Why did they build the mounds? How did they do it? Was there free parking? Translating, again, from the Academese: “Got me, pal.”

Then comes a prolix wall headed “Powerful Leaders.”

Why did people give up power to make some of their own decisions? Central decision makers were often more effective than groups at organizing large amounts of labor, managing resources, and directing wars.

So maybe it was Hillary, not Obama, who got elected. This brings us to the Maya and their abominable customs, nicely glossed:

. . . Sacrifice has played a role in the religious beliefs of many people throughout history and in all parts of the world. . . . Even today almost all world religions include sacrifice of some kind in their spiritual practices.

Now wait a damn minute, you infidel apes of social science. Shut your Brie holes and listen up. God,
the
God, the God
who didn't make me an Eskimo, does not require human sacrifice; 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.” That is the difference—perhaps the only difference—between civilization and savagery. And it's not just we Christians who say so. From the time of Abraham no monotheist has practiced human sacrifice; no Buddhist ever has, and no Hindu since the days of suttee and the Thugs. No Taoist, no Confucian, no Zoroastrian, Bahaist, or Sikh includes murder in his “spiritual practices.”

The text on the Maya continues:

Some societies in the ancient Americas, like the Maya, practiced bloodletting or human sacrifice as part of their ceremonies or spiritual beliefs. Why? Anthropologists don't fully know.

Let's finish that sentence. “Anthropologists don't fully know
the difference between right and wrong
.”

In a nook around the corner from “Mayan Spirituality” a computer-animated movie runs on a continuous loop. “Living in a State Society” offers a different definition of civilization. “State Societies” are, it seems, all societies in which sticks and grass aren't the principal constituents of housing, wardrobe, and diet. 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. “For the first time,” the narrator drones, “the ruling class had a different standard of living than others. Why would people want to give up their freedom? For most there was no choice.”

The message of the movie is, I think, to build a wigwam, wear a hula skirt, and boil some sticks for dinner. Or maybe the message is to pack the car and move to North Korea. Or, possibly, the message is to get over it, accept Big Chief Obama or Big Chief Hillary, as the case may be, and learn to love his or her tax hikes, retreat from promoting international democracy, and Mayan-style spiritual beliefs (including health care bloodletting) because “there was no choice.”

After a twist and a turn in the exhibit's vagrant route you are among the Aztecs and Incas. The loathsome Aztecs devoted most of their energy to human sacrifices, horrifying in extent and gruesome in technique. “The Ancient Americans” treats this in a moving-right-along manner.

From mild bloodletting to violent death, sacrifice offered thanks to the gods while maintaining the natural order of the world.

The original “New World Order,” as it were. Inscriptions also give a nod to media hype:

The Spanish often emphasized accounts of bloodthirsty sacrifice to justify conquering the Aztec people.

You're hustled past the Incas' no doubt better-justified conquerings. You enter a hushed and funereal room with tombstone lettering on black walls.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
In 1492, the first European explorers arrived in the Americas, triggering a devastating loss of life almost inconceivable to us today.

Joseph Stalin, please go to the white courtesy phone. The wall inscription proceeds:

Here, we reflect on the magnitude of loss inflicted on America's Indigenous peoples by European invasion.

The European inflictions are grimly illustrated. The first one upon which we are expected to reflect is the only decent thing (not counting the wheel, iron, cigarette papers, etc.) that Europeans brought to America's Indigenous peoples, “Religious Conversion.” Second is “Disease,” which should stir our sympathy but hardly our guilt. The exhibit points out that disease was the chief cause of suffering after European contact. Therefore, the horrors that beset “The Ancient Americans” following 1492 would have happened if the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa María
had been manned by Jimmy Carter, the Dali Lama, and Bono.

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. This is “Living Descendants.” The ancient Americans' modern relations are regular folks, as their ancestors were, and with clothes on, too, the same as you and me. 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? Well, “despite centuries of injustice and oppression, today's Indigenous peoples strive to sustain their cultural traditions.”

You could say the same of the Irish. Being one, I looked for the exit to go find a drink. I wandered into a solemn, quiet, awe-engendering place. The large, gloomy hall devoted to life in the Arctic was now incorporated into “The Ancient Americans.” I saw, once again, the full-scale cutaway
of Eskimo winter quarters in Mackenzie Bay. Its labels are curled and yellowing but unchanged—respectful, factual, precise. The ancient Americans weren't regular folks. They lived strange, spectacular lives on strange, spectacular continents heretofore untrod by man and more remote for them than Mars—or the world of museum curation—is for us. The ancient Americans were tough as hell. They did their share of nasty stuff. But even the Aztecs 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.

Give “The Ancient Americans” exhibit back to the ancient Americans, and the Field Museum along with it. If any of the heirs and assignees of the Aztecs, Incas, or Maya feel inclined to practice a little human sacrifice on anthropologists, sociologists, moral relativists, neo-Marxists, and other conquistadors of modern academia, call it “maintaining the natural order of the world.”

Disneyland, June 2008

M
ore than half a century ago, Disneyland opened its “House of the Future” attraction. I was ten, and I was attracted. In fact, I was in love.

The Tomorrowland dwelling had a cruciform floor plan, a more elegant solution to bringing light and air into a “machine for living” than Le Corbusier had been able to devise. Each side of each arm of the X was glazed, sill to ceiling. The mullions and rails between the panes were as pleasingly orchestrated as Mondrian's black stripes. All the proportions of the home (and a home was what I saw in this house) were pleasing. Proportions are when they match the “Golden Rectangle.” The human eye loves a ratio of .618034 to 1 or, roughly, 5 by 8. Both Pythagoras and Euclid called it the
“Divine Section.” It's the mathematical value that generates the shape of the galaxies, the Fibonacci sequence, the spiral of seashells, the Parthenon's configuration, and a little piece of Disneyland circa 1957.

Of course, at 10, my critique of the House of the Future was, “It's neat.” But, within the limits of childish understanding, I would have tried to explain. I was an architecture fan the way my friends were sports fans. I was a big Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School booster. But I had a soft spot for the neoclassical, even though, as a member of the modernist pep club, I knew I wasn't supposed to. (Just as there were certain kids who had nursed a secret hope that the Yankees would beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series.) And I couldn't help booing the diluted, piddle-colored brick version of the International Style that filled the construction sites of my childhood. The only way you could tell a shopping center from a grade school from a minimum-security prison was by the amount of flood-lighting and fence wire involved.

Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war. But the HoF wasn't marred by starkness. The spare white form had been warmed with curves. Each quadrant was a streamlined seamed pod, a crossbreed: half jet fuselage, half legume. And, as with an airplane or a beanstalk, the structure rose aloft, flying on a plinth above its house lot.

This was not the domicile's most practical feature when it came to helping Mom unload the groceries from the DeSoto Fireflite station wagon. (Chrysler Corporation's advertising slogan in 1957: “Suddenly it's 1960!”) But levitation sure would have enlarged my weenie subdivision yard. There'd be room for a bit of Tomorrowland for my own family, or,
anyway, a trampoline. I remember wondering what our “colonial” (which didn't even merit the prefix pseudo- ) would look like jacked up eight feet and plopped on a shaft. Better, definitely.

The House of the Future was sponsored by the Monsanto Company and designed by Marvin Goody and Richard Hamilton from the MIT architecture department. They were prescient in various unimportant ways: the residence contained cordless phones, a flat-screen, wall-size TV; and a somewhat sinister-sounding device called a “microwave oven.” Otherwise the only relationship between the futurism and the future was that today, in Los Angeles and New York, every bit of the place would be worth tens of thousands of dollars as a precious “Mid-Century Modern” antique.

The most nostalgically futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic. In 1957 plastic still enjoyed the benefit of its definition (2a) in Merriam-Webster's: “capable of being molded and shaped”—into anything you wanted! Plastic was the stuff that didn't rust or rot or break when you dropped it. Thanks to plastic and a little glue, even the clumsiest kid (me) could build splendidly detailed models of PanAm Mars Passenger Rockets and atomic-powered automobiles and all the other things that wouldn't happen. We were a decade away from the scene in
The Graduate
that made the word an epithet. I, for one, think Dustin Hoffman's character should have taken the career advice, and the stupid movie should have ended then and there. Instead, in 1967, it was Disney's House of the Future that came to an abrupt finish. Or not-so-abrupt. Reports have it that a wrecking ball merely bounced on the sturdy polymer seed cases, and the prematurely postmodernist structure had to be sawed apart by hand. (As many a
timorous would-be suicide has discovered—with vise-like grip on a bridge railing—the future is harder to get rid of than you'd think.)