SANTO TOMAS DE CASTILLA, Guatemala — Wherever is that, you ask?
Generally this column comes to you from Washington, D.C. or New
York City. Occasionally it comes from London or Paris. Yet today it
carries the dateline of a seaport in Guatemala, and if it were
written a day ago or two days hence it would carry the dateline of
Belize. It is freezing up north. The inclement weather has driven
me to tropical parts. Global warming sounds more and more agreeable
to me, and frankly if you have your wits about you, to you too. The
frozen remains of palm trees have supposedly been found in the
melting ice of the poles. Well, that is good news. Bring together a
village of Eskimos and notify them of the so-called perils of
global warming and, my guess is, they would to a man and a woman
all become vociferous advocates of man-made climate change or
anthropogenic climate change, as the phrase has it. Think of it?
Wearing a bikini in the North Pole. That is progress!
I am aboard the cruise ship Yorktown once again!
Last summer we took an amiable crowd of National Review
and American Spectator readers on a tour of the Great
Lakes. This winter we have taken mainly AmSpec readers on
a tour of the Mayan ruins in Belize and Guatemala with stops along
the way to inspect the barrier reefs, fish life, and even to
partake of snorkeling. Also, we are doing a good bit of basking in
the sun and snickering at our friends up north.
Of particular interest is the Mayan civilization. It flourished
in the jungles of these parts from roughly 1500 B.C. to 1521 A.D.,
whereupon it ceased. Gone, fini, vanished — just like
that! No war nor pestilence nor plague has been detected by modern
scholars seeking to explain its passing. There remain great stone
edifices: temples, palaces, living-quarters — even evidence of
sacred altars for human sacrifice. However, there is no extant
evidence as to why Mayan civilization ceased. It was highly
advanced with a written language and astronomical literacy. Yet no
word has been found that anything was amiss before 1521 A.D. when
it utterly ceased to function. There are Mayans around today, but
none seems to know why he is not living atop a ruin in the jungle,
perhaps with colorful feathers sticking in his hair and a fancy
wand or whatever those sticks are that his ancestors are pictured
carrying. I doubt it has even occurred to a modern-day Mayan to
reclaim a palace or one of the splendid temples in the jungle even
for an occasional ritual sacrifice. Perhaps they are too polite.
Modern-day Mayans seem to prefer to hang around the village gas
station.
American Indians make all manner of extravagant claims on the
federal government, some of which have resulted in extravagant
restitution. The modern-day Mayans make no such claims down here in
Belize or Guatemala. They seem to prefer hanging out at the gas
station to taking over a temple or palace. Why does not a local
Mayan huckster with a huckster’s gift for dramaturgy and eloquence
simply take over a Mayan ruin and declare it his own? Maybe he
could even collect taxes. Surely he could take his case to the
United Nations or the World Court. Possibly today’s Mayans have
suffered a huge failure of the imagination. Possibly it began back
in 1521 A.D. when the Mayan civilization went poof. Have
modern scholars detected in the records of the ancient Mayans any
signs of an awareness of mounting economic problems, of an
accumulating unsustainable national debt or of entitlements leading
to bankruptcy? The Mayans boasted a rich hieroglyphic language. Is
there a word in old Mayan for entitlement? How in Mayan would one
spell Obamacare?
The other day as I tripped over a Mayan ruin, some dismal
thoughts did occur to me. Could we go the way of the Mayans? Well,
I doubt we would leave no evidence of the cause of our demise.
True, our godlike leader has never fretted about the problems of
entitlements or of unsustainable national debt. If he ever thought
seriously about the IOUs being wrung up by the government, he would
never have wasted years trying to bring down on us yet another
unsustainable entitlement, Obamacare. But there are other leaders
in other branches of government who are immensely worried about the
perilous state of our economy and about the drift of our leaders
away from the Constitution. In the courts, in the House of
Representatives, and in the states there is mounting concern that
the Progressives in Washington are en route to national decline, if
not the end of civilization as we know it.
I had better get back to Washington. There is work to be
done.
