I'm trying to figure out National Geographic this month. I snapped this photo at the grocery store in the checkout line. The cover story is, "Jamestown: The Real Story: How settlers destroyed a native empire and changed the landscape from the ground up." Sounds perfect for the blame-America-first crowd.
But on their website, they show a different cover as "This month in National Geographic." This one has a small picture of a pig on it, and it says, "Creating America: 400 years ago, a pig, a worm, and a tobacco leaf changed our landscape from the ground up. It all started in Jamestown."
And when you click on the "Jamestown" link in the Features list, you get, "What would you take to the new world?" It's about some of the artifacts they've found.
The online version is so much more innocuous-sounding than the cover on the stands. I can't say if the contents are the same, because I'm darn-well not going to give them any money for making it appear that the settlers came here to destroy empires.
It reminds me of some of what I learned in San Antonio at the non-Alamo missions. There, the San Antonio area tribes were being marauded by out-of-state Comanches, so they put themselves under the protection of the Spaniards, even though that protection included hard labor.
How many empires had come and gone in Jamestown before the English got there? I can't say, but do the America-blamers know how long Powhatan's tribe had been there or whether that tribe had vanquished any others in the building of their empire? And how long might they have remained before another tribe conquered them? People who think that cultures and civilizations are static, just because we first saw them a certain way in a certain place are self-deluded.
There's a sense among the America-hating groups that primitive cultures are morally pure, while white people are nothing but immoral destroyers of innocence, and I get tired of it. The fact that National Geographic seems to have jumped on this bandwagon--in print, at least--is disappointing, though hardly surprising.
Here are a couple commentaries from WorldNetDaily on the topic of Jamestown's 400th anniversary. This one is on the way the National Park Service is shaming America for having sprung from such a dreadful invasion. And this one has a similar theme, but looks more into the reasons behind the settlers' decision to come here.
I wish saner heads would prevail when it comes to the official version of American history, but I guess that's asking too much.
3 comments:
Some day, when the Congress makes Spanish the official language... We can talk about how the Mexicans charged in, overran us, and destroyed our white anglo culture.
Then we can be pure, too.
Perhaps you should try reading the article before criticizing it. Being critical of something before knowing the whole story is biased, uninformed, and irresponsible.
Anonymous,
Perhaps. But then, I didn't criticize the article. I criticized the cover headline for making it look like our forefathers came here to destroy people.
Perhaps you should try read my whole post before criticizing it.
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