Heroes, Saints, and Founding Fathers

Mass-Murdering Thieves Were Held up to Me as Heroic Icons, But Virtually All Societies Have Performed Similar Myth-Making

I am not sure at what age I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but it was around age five, I believe.  I remember making a Pilgrim’s outfit out of construction paper in kindergarten, as I traded one fantasy for another.  The son of the native leader who welcomed the Pilgrims had his head mounted on a pole in Plymouth for 24 years, and Thanksgiving celebrations were held when native societies were annihilated.  That was the real Thanksgiving tradition in my great nation. 

That is the earliest nationalistic indoctrination that I can recall.  Probably the same week that I made that Pilgrim outfit, John Kennedy was murdered, and another nationalistic fairy tale was spun, that a Lone Nut did it, when it was really a CIA operation that got JFK killed. 

My next memory of such indoctrination was when I lived in Houston at age eight.  The standard schoolboy fare included the Alamo and Sam Houston’s heroics.  There was nothing heroic about Texas’s war for independence, as Americans began stealing Mexico, and Texas was a warmup.  Mexico had outlawed slavery, but Americans brought it back to its newly stolen land. 

The next year, it was back to California and I went to Junípero Serra Elementary School, which is right down the street from the house where I grew up.  I watched a film of Serra’s holy life in fourth grade.  I visited his missions on field trips, and the last job that I had in college was a stone’s throw away from another Serra mission.  In 2015, the pious padre was sainted.  It was not until I read David Stannard’s American Holocaust in 1992 (here it is) that I ever saw a blemish on Serra’s saintly reputation.  That was early in my days of study, and I eventually learned that Serra was the Hitler of California, and those cherished missions were really death camps. 

Soon before I read Stannard’s devastating book, I encountered the first blemishes that I ever saw on another heroic icon: Christopher Columbus.  Howard Zinn had a chapter on it in his legendary A People’s History of the United States.  I quoted from that chapter in my Columbus essay (I got Zinn’s permission to do so), and irony of ironies, when I read that chapter on Columbus, I worked in Columbus, Ohio, which was in the middle of staging a year-long celebration of the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s heroic feat.  Columbus initiated the greatest genocide in the human journey.  There was an effort in the 1800s to declare Columbus a saint. 

I was born in Seattle, Washington, in a state named after Founding Father George Washington, who was the richest man in the USA when he became president, with the land that he stole from the Indians and his hundreds of slaves.  The southern border of Washington is the Columbia River, named for Columbus.  During my days of study, I learned that Washington was one of history’s most successful criminals, as he crafted the plan to steal a continent, which Wikipedia still cannot bring itself to mention. 

Mass-murdering thieves were presented to me as heroic icons, even saints, and I did not learn differently until many years later.  It was outrageous to learn the truth about those heroic, even saintly, icons.  But I eventually learned that such lies were normal. 

Slaughtering neighboring societies was normal in hunter-gatherer societies, exterminating them in dawn raids was standard procedure, and such behaviors go back to chimps.  In agrarian and herder societies, plundering neighboring societies became the noblest of professions.  The USA has agrarian roots that are still evident, so heroifying mass-murdering thieves was a time-honored tradition.  I learned that American mythmaking was no different from what other societies have done, probably for as long as there have been behaviorally modern humans. 

Of course, in the Fifth Epoch, there will be no need for that.