Last week I breathlessly binge-watched the last several episodes of the Spanish telenovela, El Hotel de los Secretos (originally, to get my Spanish up to snuff), which had been very good up to this point. It was a period piece, taking place in the Mexican countryside of 1907-08, just before the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Diaz was tossed out by a long and violent revolution (Pancho Villa was part of it. He crossed into US territory and robbed a town, and brought in the US army to chase him around the northern Mexican desert for a few months. My great grandfather was a medical doctor on that expedition, and the US lost many men almost entirely due to disease. Pancho Villa escaped unharmed). In it, the rich "catires" - a derogatory word for white people - lounged at a luxury hotel in the country, surrounded by doting and servile maids and waiters. The owning family was up to its eyeballs in intrigue over inheritance, and many murders were made that had to be solved. The period costumes and sets were excellent, and the acting just as good. However, the last few episodes left me wondering in disbelief.
Here, the revolutionaries finally came to town, burning many buildings, setting free prisoners, and partying like it was 1908. The Gran Hotel had finally been inherited by a bastard son of the original owner (who had been poisoned by his wacky daughter), whose mother was a servant and non - catire. And finally, finally, this bastard son gave the hotel to the servants, promising a better tomorrow. The old ways were gone, the new and fairer ways were coming in, and at last, justice and equality would be had for all. Viva la revolucion!
Except that is not, as far as we can now see, what really happened. The democratic/socialist spirit of the revolution almost instantly gave way to warring factions, mass murder and rape and pillage, and a variety of dictatorships. By the 1930's, Mexico had fascist sympathies and was shooting Catholic priests (see Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory). It was then that a dictatorship finally solidified its grip on power, one whose political party would retain near universal control, despite the facade of democracy, until the late 1990's. While the people of Mexico are wonderful as a whole, and the middle class has grown considerably since then, the power hierarchy is corrupt from president to local policeman. Many honest men and women are targeted for assassination by the cartels. Whole swaths of Mexico now are ruled by these narco-gangsters. Life is still not good, as millions of legal and illegal immigrants to the US silently prove to the world every year.
But all this is swept under the rug in my telenovela, in a form which can only be called mythological history. Here, the writers presumably mirror their watcher's belief that Mexico has come a long, long way from those bad old days. In stark reality, in some ways it has, but in many other ways, it is actually worse. No matter. This is what (I believe) they want to believe and will believe. This is their history. This is their myth.
I am immediately reminded of the gospel in which Jesus asks only those free of sin to throw the first stone. Our own American myths are on obvious display now because the earlier one - the one that my generation grew up with - has now been almost thoroughly displaced. The genius heroes that we were taught that our founding fathers were are now depicted as racists and sexists who did it all for profit and the retention of power for their elite White Male group. My son's history classes in high school accentuated Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the Martin Luther freedom movement, ignoring many of the sacrifices and high ideals of our former (mostly white male) heroes. As with my telenovela, the information we now are given is not necessarily wrong - but the emphasis has been changed, and many pertinent things as to the reality of the past have been ignored. We have essentially changed America's mythological history so quickly that it is stunningly obvious to a large portion of older Americans.
It will change again, without a doubt, and in so doing, should remind us that the models we accept as the nature of our reality are extremely limited, and ultimately untrue. This works for the natural sciences as well as the social sciences. None of us know any more than small portions of reality, and those in control of information further reduce what we know to fit into their preferred notion of reality. Without another scrap of information, we could entirely alter our perception of what we are, not only as Americans or Mexicans, but as human beings. In the natural sciences, certain information is discarded that does not fit into the "paradigm," again affecting the way we think about the very ground under our feet. Our spirituality is even more malleable. Whereas those of European ancestry once had an unshakable belief system, many now have an airy mix of beliefs or no belief in anything beyond the very ground under their feet which is also so poorly defined.
While such realizations might make us uncomfortable, they can also be comforting. We can see that our world is not "locked up", that no one can chain us to this or that paradigm without our consent. We can see that there is always more to learn, and that magic and spirit - those experiences which are beyond our current concept structure - can really be real. We can allow ourselves to open up to the infinite, beyond our simple constructs of reality, to find something far greater. It is what the mystics have always talked about - that one must leave the world behind to find it. This may be one of those times, lost in the confusion of cultural myths, where the window to something far greater - towards what we might call God - is about as open as it ever gets. We might want to jump at this chance before the window is closed again by orthodoxy or dictatorship of some kind or other, which is, given our current understanding of history, almost always inevitable. FK
Here, the revolutionaries finally came to town, burning many buildings, setting free prisoners, and partying like it was 1908. The Gran Hotel had finally been inherited by a bastard son of the original owner (who had been poisoned by his wacky daughter), whose mother was a servant and non - catire. And finally, finally, this bastard son gave the hotel to the servants, promising a better tomorrow. The old ways were gone, the new and fairer ways were coming in, and at last, justice and equality would be had for all. Viva la revolucion!
Except that is not, as far as we can now see, what really happened. The democratic/socialist spirit of the revolution almost instantly gave way to warring factions, mass murder and rape and pillage, and a variety of dictatorships. By the 1930's, Mexico had fascist sympathies and was shooting Catholic priests (see Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory). It was then that a dictatorship finally solidified its grip on power, one whose political party would retain near universal control, despite the facade of democracy, until the late 1990's. While the people of Mexico are wonderful as a whole, and the middle class has grown considerably since then, the power hierarchy is corrupt from president to local policeman. Many honest men and women are targeted for assassination by the cartels. Whole swaths of Mexico now are ruled by these narco-gangsters. Life is still not good, as millions of legal and illegal immigrants to the US silently prove to the world every year.
But all this is swept under the rug in my telenovela, in a form which can only be called mythological history. Here, the writers presumably mirror their watcher's belief that Mexico has come a long, long way from those bad old days. In stark reality, in some ways it has, but in many other ways, it is actually worse. No matter. This is what (I believe) they want to believe and will believe. This is their history. This is their myth.
I am immediately reminded of the gospel in which Jesus asks only those free of sin to throw the first stone. Our own American myths are on obvious display now because the earlier one - the one that my generation grew up with - has now been almost thoroughly displaced. The genius heroes that we were taught that our founding fathers were are now depicted as racists and sexists who did it all for profit and the retention of power for their elite White Male group. My son's history classes in high school accentuated Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the Martin Luther freedom movement, ignoring many of the sacrifices and high ideals of our former (mostly white male) heroes. As with my telenovela, the information we now are given is not necessarily wrong - but the emphasis has been changed, and many pertinent things as to the reality of the past have been ignored. We have essentially changed America's mythological history so quickly that it is stunningly obvious to a large portion of older Americans.
It will change again, without a doubt, and in so doing, should remind us that the models we accept as the nature of our reality are extremely limited, and ultimately untrue. This works for the natural sciences as well as the social sciences. None of us know any more than small portions of reality, and those in control of information further reduce what we know to fit into their preferred notion of reality. Without another scrap of information, we could entirely alter our perception of what we are, not only as Americans or Mexicans, but as human beings. In the natural sciences, certain information is discarded that does not fit into the "paradigm," again affecting the way we think about the very ground under our feet. Our spirituality is even more malleable. Whereas those of European ancestry once had an unshakable belief system, many now have an airy mix of beliefs or no belief in anything beyond the very ground under their feet which is also so poorly defined.
While such realizations might make us uncomfortable, they can also be comforting. We can see that our world is not "locked up", that no one can chain us to this or that paradigm without our consent. We can see that there is always more to learn, and that magic and spirit - those experiences which are beyond our current concept structure - can really be real. We can allow ourselves to open up to the infinite, beyond our simple constructs of reality, to find something far greater. It is what the mystics have always talked about - that one must leave the world behind to find it. This may be one of those times, lost in the confusion of cultural myths, where the window to something far greater - towards what we might call God - is about as open as it ever gets. We might want to jump at this chance before the window is closed again by orthodoxy or dictatorship of some kind or other, which is, given our current understanding of history, almost always inevitable. FK
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