He becomes the face of our sky...
"After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.E. L. Doctorow in an otherwise brilliantly reasoned and impassioned condemnation of George Bush as an unfeeling and damaged man who should not have been allowed to become President of the United States.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation.
The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war."
He glosses over the fundamentalist's view of death as merely a threshold experience, to paint Bush as a sociopath, which a point could be made that the fundamentalist view of death enables, actually should enable a sociopathic tolerance of death and suffering in others, especially those designated inferior and/or "bad". In the same way the prophecies of the Book of Revelation give cheer to certain religious minds and hearts when coupled with news of a catastrophically warming planet. Reconciling Judeo-Christian disdain for life with the clamor for revenge and earthly eye-for-eye justice is beyond the scope of this post.
The business of Neanderthals as prototypes of militant brutality though, is what concerns me. Because the image we have of them is from their murderers I believe, and from the heirs of their murderers, and the stories that have traditionally been told to disguise the crimes of extinction were until recently all we had to go on.
It's too much like the savages and primitive spear-carrying animals that were the default images of aboriginals in the recent past - a lie that was necessary in order that the privileged children wouldn't find out too soon how savage their own ancestry was, so that the illusion of civilization, with its shackles and rewards and thin veneer of gentleness, could be carried forward.
The Neanderthals' brains were roughly ten percent larger than those of modern humans. They buried their dead, they had symbolic figurines and artwork.
They lived successfully.
My guess is they were driven to extinction the same way so many other creatures have been. The story of Cain and Abel comes to mind.
This sentence mirrors exactly the post-Columbian experience of the natives of the "New World":
"The Neanderthals were highly successful over a large region for a substantial period of time, but this situation changed dramatically with the arrival in Europe of the first modern humans, Homo sapiens."The pseudo-controversy over whether they were violently eliminated or sexually/genetically absorbed isn't central, both are possible and likely, remnants of the extermination having no choice but assimilation - but their culture, as a distinct alter-human presence, was eliminated and there's nothing in the subsequent behavior of the surviving species to indicate it was anything other than oppressively violent.
Hominids and hybrids: The place of Neanderthals in human evolution
Tattersall/Schwartz National Academy of Sciences
