Columbus Discovers Iraq

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

It was Tuesday, the “Day of Direct Action”, and New York’s Finest were happy to oblige by rolling up almost 1,000 protesters in orange construction-site netting, handcuffing them with plastic cinch ties, and shipping them off to a stinking warehouse on a contaminated westside pier. I had made my presence count on the previous Sunday with 400,000 other agitators when we took over 5 hours to march loudly past the RNC. For the national media, who only cover the easy stuff, that was the day that mattered. I’m not anxious to get arrested yet, and it seemed to me that I would be safer in the path of Hurricane Frances, which was barreling through the Caribbean, so I got on American Airlines daily sky bus to The Dominican Republic.

Hispaniola – the second largest island after Cuba and the site of Columbus’ first settlement. It’s two countries now; Haiti and The DR, and back then it must have looked as big as a continent with waves crashing on limestone cliffs, broad plateaus and dense forests climbing up the slopes of 10,000’ peaks. The discoverers’ first encampment was Puerto Plata on the north coast and a small contingent was left to winter there. When Columbus returned the following year they were all dead, killed by Taino warriors for stealing their women and bullying them for gold. The second-voyage marines, carrying arquebuses, rudimentary muzzle-loaders, quickly tamed them. Shaped something like trombones, and filled with powder charges and wads of cloth, they could fire anything at hand: shot, nails, stones, animal parts, whatever.

The settlement of choice, the first real colony in the New World, was built on the south shore at the mouth of the Rio Ozama (no relation to the bin Ladens) and named Santo Domingo. It was there, in the zona colonial that I took up residence to relax, drink aged rum, smoke Cuban cigars, ride out a hurricane and meditate on what’s right and what’s wrong with America. I got a room in the renovated Hotel Palacio, which with it’s thick stone walls, cool inner courtyard and massive corbelled beams seemed solid enough. The room was high-ceilinged with a huge wrought iron chandelier, the floors were limestone, the furniture was cedro macho, the large casement windows opened in with security bars outside, and there was a digital safe in the closet. There was also a TV with CNN but reception was lost that night in the storm and it didn’t come back on for three days.

There’s not a whole lot to see in old Santo Domingo but there are two standout sites. The first is Diego Columbus’s stone house with many of the original furnishings intact, and where you can still feel the presence of the family who settled here on the threshold of a new world of unlimited potential, protected by a river, high walls, a garrison, a fort, and the full weight of the Spanish Empire. The second is the cathedral, unpreposing on the outside with its crude limestone walls, but inside a soaring, inspired space of groined and vaulted ceilings, brilliant colored glass, and carved mahogany pulpits like crow’s nests that are accessed by wooden staircases that spiral up around massive columns. This Catedral Primada de America, the first in America, it’s cornerstone laid by Diego Columbus in 1514, was the base for dioceses in Lima, Cartagena, Santigo de Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico and even New Orleans before the Louisiana Purchase. From here, wave after wave of evangelicals spread across the western hemisphere; irrefutable and often deadly to the indigenous people. It took well over two hundred years before the framers of the American Constitution had the courage and genius of humanism to set down a clear and absolute separation of church and state.

The cathedral is on the south side of Parque Colon and houses Christopher Columbus’ remains in a vault below the altar. In the middle of the tree-lined and shaded square there is a large stone statue of the man who took the biggest risk of all and discovered America. On the north side are some shops selling red, black and blue amber, and larimar, a cobalt blue gemstone found only on this island. There’s also a grand hotel and an indoor/outdoor café where I spent most of my hours when it wasn’t raining, which was most of the time, as Frances took a big hook to the north, seemingly more intent on pummeling Florida than poor, little Hispaniola. When you’re sitting at that café, and you’re letting your sense of the passage of time adjust to a pace more than a few clicks down from that of Manhattan, you can read, or talk, or people-watch, or you can look at that statue.

Christopher Columbus, simultaneously revered in the Caribbean as La Guia, the guide, and feared as the harbinger of bad luck should his name even be uttered, stands on a towering base sixteen feet tall. He himself is ten feet tall, cloaked in deep robes and that distinctive hat he always wears with the earflaps up. His right hand rests on a ship’s capstan and his left arm is extended dramatically, his index finger pointing to a far horizon. At his feet and climbing the north face of the base, a nubile Taino Indian maiden, dressed only in loin cloth and feather headdress, reaches up with her right hand, her large, firm breasts jutting forward. In her hand is a writing implement, and into the stone face she has just inscribed his name in flowing script, “Cristobal Colon.”

This is a very romantic tableau and gets a lot of attention from tour groups, sightseers, and of course, pigeons. As the days passed, I began to see it as something different. I began to see it as the hallmark of empire, as an icon designed to advance a doctrine, and finally, as an assemblage of propagandist techniques made three-dimensional. The same techniques, the same mind numbing, depressingly simple and effective techniques that the empire I had briefly left behind was even now shoveling relentlessly into living rooms across America.

The first technique is misrepresentation. That Taina, if she were to carve into stone the truth, would write: “Because of enslavement, because of forced religious conversion, because of strange foreign diseases, my tribe has been decimated, and within a few precious years we Taino people, our language, our myths, our legends, and our dreams, will be completely extinct.” Instead, she is there to symbolize the first contract between empire and a new world’s indigenous peoples, and we all know how well empire has lived up to its treaties with Indians. Propaganda misrepresents reality, often by restating or reclassifying something as it’s exact opposite. For instance, the Bush Administration has cynically created “The Patriot Act” and “Free Speech Zones” which contain unprecedented attacks on our constitutional rights of privacy, due process, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and a free press.

The second technique is simplification. Columbus' left hand, pointing to magnetic north; so decisive, so definitive. Every discussion at the base of that statue inevitably digresses to this question: where is he pointing? A typical example: four Latino gentleman get into a series of mild rebukes that starts with the declaration that, “He’s pointing to Puerto Rico, but, no, that’s to the east. So, well, then he’s pointing to Venezuela, right? No! Idiota! If Puerto Rica’s east then Venezuela’s behind the cathedral! So he’s pointing north, to America?” And so it goes, completely forgotten the doomed but still worshipful Taina. Simplification obviates the need to examine implications or effects. Columbus, who first praised the Taino culture but soon, darkly, realized their potential as slaves, remains high on his pedestal as long as we focus on his skills as a navigator, and not the loss of a moral compass. In the run-up to the Iraq War, the Bush Administration used this technique with the false dichotomy of “we’re under attack, it’s invade Iraq or do nothing!”

The third technique is repetition, as in: tell a lie often enough and it will be believed. This statue, in it’s central location, is repetition carved in stone – every morning at dawn the Indian maiden climbs again out of the shadows to the feet of the man whose outstretched arm, like a sundial’s post, defines in an arc on the ground the passing of time, hour by hour, day after day. The Bush Administration utilizes repetition with the drumbeat of “War On Terror”, a nebulous term like the “War On Drugs” or the “War On Poverty”, that actually means nothing but is proclaimed relentlessly and insidiously to conflate the war on Iraq with the fight against Al Qaeda. How can one have a war on terror when war is terror? Still, “War On Terror” gets frequent usage as a catchphrase to describe any self-serving but potentially controversial activity that comes to light, as a banner across the screen on Fox News every time fighting in Iraq is shown, and to deflect attention away from real failures in dealing with real terrorists, like Osama bin Laden.

This statue, the most famous in Hispaniola, uses propaganda to maintain the historic doctrine of the Spanish Empire and to cast the best light on her expeditions westward that invaded and evangelized a new world, laid waste to its great kingdoms, and claimed their mountains of silver and gold. Ask yourself if today, in America, are a cabal of neo-conservative ideologues, backed by a venal military/industrial complex and a zealous Southern Baptist Coalition, using the techniques of propaganda to lead us eastward to invade and evangelize the Mideast, lay waste to Islamic regimes, and claim their rivers of oil?