Poor Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winning author, has gone the way of all flesh, as has his bestest buddy, Fidel “Fidelito” Castro, but his astounding book One Hundred Years of Solitude lives on as one of the most entertaining and profound books of our age. As with works by many authors, the novel exceeds the wisdom of the author. Marquez’s masterpiece takes place in Columbia, right next door to Venezuela, whose revolutionary leader, Hugo Chavez, was also a bestest buddy of Fidelito. The record of that relationship is writ tragically large in Venezuela now. Marquez should have known better, as he himself wrote of the violence and ruin we court when we forget history. In so doing, or so he wrote, we are not only doomed to repeat history, but are eventually doomed, period.
We go back to the primary fictional village in his book, Macondo, founded by the wandering patriarch of the Buendia family. We see it grow into a town and then into a small city as it goes through a set of personal histories affected and reflected by the looming events of national history, all in surreal Technicolor similar in its magical realism and depth to the Bible. At one point, everyone begins to forget things. They forget things so much that they put notes up to themselves to remember things, only to forget who put them up in the first place, and why. The town falls into a state of stupor. Somewhere around then, the civil war begins (a civil war which continues in reality, albeit subdued, to this day), and at one point thousands are killed and taken out of town by rail to be dumped somewhere off in the jungle, or off into the distant sea. Nobody remembers this, either, or at least no one is supposed to remember this. In this, Marquez is giving us the message: don’t forget your history; remember what has already occurred to understand what is happening today. If one does not do so, one will never understand the present.
While Marquez presented the situation in quirky nightmarish form, we would do well to read and ponder his story, for it is obvious that we are caught in the same trap of forgetfulness ourselves. As I see it, it manifests itself in two primary ways. The first concerns modernistic hubris, in that we seem to think that all the ugly stuff of the past is now long gone, put behind us by our supreme sophistication. This is ridiculous: the horrors of our past are alive and well within us now. I am not just talking about Hitler and antebellum slavery, but our larger past, which includes the Roman Empire, the feudal states, the religious wars, the Inquisition, the pogroms – all of it. The point of this history is not to shame us or just to humble us, but to show us what we as humans are made of. We, all of us, have a violent and greedy dark side. This is not just true of certain classes or races of people, but of all of us who share the human genome. With this realization we should understand that we can fall into barbarity or totalitarianism at any moment. It is not something to play around with. We are not fundamentally different emotionally and morally from our collective ancestors. Rather, it is only our fragile and relatively recent discoveries about our potential that keep us, however tenuously, from terror and enslavement.
Second: in forgetting our history, we have allowed others to rewrite it. As a former history student, I have been alarmed by the – I almost hesitate to call it what it is – selectively destructive propaganda that students are now taught. If you consider yourself a centrist or right- of - center in the political debate, you are already familiar with the complaint. In this (for instance), George Washington is defined by his ownership of slaves, not his unbelievable sacrifice to his country for an idea of freedom, or his epic courage. Abolitionists such as Adams and Franklin are forgotten as the current historical eye focuses instead on slave-owner Jefferson, forgetting his own brilliance and call for freedom for all, at least eventually. In this, it is forgotten that all the civilized world from China to the Mississippi Basin to Peru had slaves that were often brutally mistreated or killed. Instead, the expanse of real history is perverted and distorted and reshaped for certain ends which seem ominously like something Marquez would mistakenly admire in 20th century Havana.
There is more to history than just politics. In the end of One Hundred Years, the descendants of the founding Buendia patriarch become morally perverse. The male inheritor begins to have sex with his sister, bizarre sex that is presented with some humor to slightly veil a greater ugliness. It is through this, in a magical way that seems quite ordinary in the context of the book, that the remnants of the city implode, and it reverts to the chaos of vine and forest that it once was. We see that in one hundred years, the history of civilization has been writ small: we are taken from foundation to prosperity to violence and political corruption, then to moral decay, then to final and total destruction. It is Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Egypt, the Mayans and the Ming dynasty, all of the great empires in a nutshell. In Macondo, as in most empires, the end began when people forgot their history, that which tells all of us who we really are. It is knowledge that can spur us on towards our potential for greatness as well as warn us of our potential for barbarity.
This, our moral history, is now being taught in distorted form. We are now being told that the great moral structure of our civilization painstakingly built over millennia is bigoted and wrong. As one former truth is demonized, those who want to are then able to move on and demonize the whole thing. Is theft really theft if one is only stealing from an (presumably) undeserving upper class? Is it really murder if the victim is too young (or too old) to speak, let alone vote? Is any of the moral code for sexual behavior valid if parts of it have already been tossed into the rubbish heap?
What does real history tell us happens to a civilization that does such things? It took Macondo only one hundred years to find out, but that is fiction. In reality, collapse might come in a year from without, or over centuries from within. In each case the trend is downward. Renewal is possible, but only if we have the courage to remember who and what we are as fully and honestly as possible.
Poor Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winning author, has gone the way of all flesh, as has his bestest buddy, Fidel “Fidelito” Castro, but his astounding book One Hundred Years of Solitude lives on as one of the most entertaining and profound books of our age. As with works by many authors, the novel exceeds the wisdom of the author. Marquez’s masterpiece takes place in Columbia, right next door to Venezuela, whose revolutionary leader, Hugo Chavez, was also a bestest buddy of Fidelito. The record of that relationship is writ tragically large in Venezuela now. Marquez should have known better, as he himself wrote of the violence and ruin we court when we forget history. In so doing, or so he wrote, we are not only doomed to repeat history, but are eventually doomed, period.
We go back to the primary fictional village in his book, Macondo, founded by the wandering patriarch of the Buendia family. We see it grow into a town and then into a small city as it goes through a set of personal histories affected and reflected by the looming events of national history, all in surreal Technicolor similar in its magical realism and depth to the Bible. At one point, everyone begins to forget things. They forget things so much that they put notes up to themselves to remember things, only to forget who put them up in the first place, and why. The town falls into a state of stupor. Somewhere around then, the civil war begins (a civil war which continues in reality, albeit subdued, to this day), and at one point thousands are killed and taken out of town by rail to be dumped somewhere off in the jungle, or off into the distant sea. Nobody remembers this, either, or at least no one is supposed to remember this. In this, Marquez is giving us the message: don’t forget your history; remember what has already occurred to understand what is happening today. If one does not do so, one will never understand the present.
While Marquez presented the situation in quirky nightmarish form, we would do well to read and ponder his story, for it is obvious that we are caught in the same trap of forgetfulness ourselves. As I see it, it manifests itself in two primary ways. The first concerns modernistic hubris, in that we seem to think that all the ugly stuff of the past is now long gone, put behind us by our supreme sophistication. This is ridiculous: the horrors of our past are alive and well within us now. I am not just talking about Hitler and antebellum slavery, but our larger past, which includes the Roman Empire, the feudal states, the religious wars, the Inquisition, the pogroms – all of it. The point of this history is not to shame us or just to humble us, but to show us what we as humans are made of. We, all of us, have a violent and greedy dark side. This is not just true of certain classes or races of people, but of all of us who share the human genome. With this realization we should understand that we can fall into barbarity or totalitarianism at any moment. It is not something to play around with. We are not fundamentally different emotionally and morally from our collective ancestors. Rather, it is only our fragile and relatively recent discoveries about our potential that keep us, however tenuously, from terror and enslavement.
Second: in forgetting our history, we have allowed others to rewrite it. As a former history student, I have been alarmed by the – I almost hesitate to call it what it is – selectively destructive propaganda that students are now taught. If you consider yourself a centrist or right- of - center in the political debate, you are already familiar with the complaint. In this (for instance), George Washington is defined by his ownership of slaves, not his unbelievable sacrifice to his country for an idea of freedom, or his epic courage. Abolitionists such as Adams and Franklin are forgotten as the current historical eye focuses instead on slave-owner Jefferson, forgetting his own brilliance and call for freedom for all, at least eventually. In this, it is forgotten that all the civilized world from China to the Mississippi Basin to Peru had slaves that were often brutally mistreated or killed. Instead, the expanse of real history is perverted and distorted and reshaped for certain ends which seem ominously like something Marquez would mistakenly admire in 20th century Havana.
There is more to history than just politics. In the end of One Hundred Years, the descendants of the founding Buendia patriarch become morally perverse. The male inheritor begins to have sex with his sister, bizarre sex that is presented with some humor to slightly veil a greater ugliness. It is through this, in a magical way that seems quite ordinary in the context of the book, that the remnants of the city implode, and it reverts to the chaos of vine and forest that it once was. We see that in one hundred years, the history of civilization has been writ small: we are taken from foundation to prosperity to violence and political corruption, then to moral decay, then to final and total destruction. It is Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Egypt, the Mayans and the Ming dynasty, all of the great empires in a nutshell. In Macondo, as in most empires, the end began when people forgot their history, that which tells all of us who we really are. It is knowledge that can spur us on towards our potential for greatness as well as warn us of our potential for barbarity.
This, our moral history, is now being taught in distorted form. We are now being told that the great moral structure of our civilization painstakingly built over millennia is bigoted and wrong. As one former truth is demonized, those who want to are then able to move on and demonize the whole thing. Is theft really theft if one is only stealing from an (presumably) undeserving upper class? Is it really murder if the victim is too young (or too old) to speak, let alone vote? Is any of the moral code for sexual behavior valid if parts of it have already been tossed into the rubbish heap?
What does real history tell us happens to a civilization that does such things? It took Macondo only one hundred years to find out, but that is fiction. In reality, collapse might come in a year from without, or over centuries from within. In each case the trend is downward. Renewal is possible, but only if we have the courage to remember who and what we are as fully and honestly as possible.
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