By Simone Bandini
“It’s better to have less thunder in your mouth and more lightning in your hand.”
(Apache)
“It is not how you are born, but how you die, that reveals to which people you belong.”
(Black Elk, Chief of the Sioux Tribe)
What reason would there be to begin with expressions of pride and honour in the age of Pan-American globalism?
Certainly a bit of colour, red specifically, of the skin and blood of the archaic Indian tribes. To remind the descendants of Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower how the Protestant and capitalist ethic has demolished the continent they colonized, establishing a ‘paradise on earth’ through what the sociologist Max Weber will lucidly call ‘election by grace’ – brutally translated: justice exercised through money (thus saving you the reading of a considerable academic tome).
Indian tribes exterminated and banished from social life, in reserves that are still today the squalid simulacrum of a flourishing mystic culture. The Indians, as we know, were often deceived in their purity, with unfulfilled agreements, military traps and unfair trials – as well as, of course, overwhelmed by the technological, financial and military divide.
The Native American tribes scattered along the tumultuous course of the Colorado River and its highlands were able for a long time to maintain the right balance between spirit and matter, thought and action, rationality and the supernatural. Using a geological metaphor, the primordial formation of their natural temple, the Grand Canyon, came about thanks to the powerful combination of telluric activism (earthquakes and volcanoes) and erosive action (winds, ice, water and precipitation).At the same time, the spirit and genius of the Indians manifests a stable balance between the irrational forces of the human soul – represented and embodied by epiphanic events, mystical interpretations and totemic animals – and the sedimentation of experience, which gave them wisdom, natural plasticity, poetry and purity.
Well, the Indians were exterminated to make way for settlements, trade and finally the speculations of these new rulers. A culture that has been extinguished in the demonic fire of modernity, especially overwhelmed by the inflamed demons of the Protestant confessions that preached a good regardless, individualistic in the secret of conscience, detached from the community element.
That’s what I thought, a deception: when I heard President Joe Biden’s statements about the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population, talking about the Gaza Strip and a red line in Rafah, not to be crossed. I felt an affable comedy, the usual pantomime, a pale façade bewilderment. The Palestinian people, while in Hollywood two films blatantly tributary to Israel are awarded as ‘Best Film’ and ‘Best Foreign Film’, increasingly resembles the Indian people.
Recommended listening: “Everyday Life”, Coldplay (Live in Jordan)