The Spiritual Taint Of George Bush...

...is being purged by a group of Mayan priests after Bush's visit to Guatemala. Gerard Vanderleun finds this rather amusing:

The Mayans, inheritors of a great and noble culture. I sort of hope they get into purifying the site of their oh-so-noble ancestors at Iximche on a daily basis. Maybe [Bush-bashing Mayan NGO leader] Juan Tiney could get a job there as spiritual janitor. That way he'd have a chance of doing something useful for his people for a change. It should be clean in about, oh, another 1,100 years.

His description of Mayan human sacrifice rites--including child sacrifices--is not for the squeamish. Whether or not they will be repeated at the Bush-cleansing ceremony is not mentioned; I'm not sure whether these Mayans are Orthodox or Reformed.

It's amazing to me how the pendulum has swung within the mythology of the West, broadly defined. It used to be that cowboys and settlers were the subject of larger-than-life myths. There was always a bit of the mystical one-with-nature vibe attributed to the Indians, even when their story wasn't being fairly told, but since the 1970's the pendulum has buried itself into full-on Ward Churchill noble-savage cult-of-authenticity condescending absurdity.

Indians are always victims, you see, and either because of their victimhood status or because of their "deeply authentic" (and eternally primitive) nature, they can do no wrong. Even when they do.