Ways to feel good about killing Indians
October 6th 2006 22:37
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"Rollicking entertainment with several really good laughs for youngsters and a jokey hipness that should amuse adults." Kurt Honeycutt.
The latest way to feel good about killing the Indians is to make a cartoon like The Emperor’s New Groove. It is unlikely that the target children’s audience will know anything about Aztecs or Incas but at the end of the movie they can be guaranteed to know nothing more and what will be known will be a perverse parody of their own cultures.
Kuzco now figures prominently on Australian week end television and is extremely popular with children. Should they be told what the Incas and Aztecs were really like? This will give them nightmares. The cruelty of both Aztecs and Incas does not make pleasant reading, especially what they did to children. For example it was necessary when carrying out a human sacrifice to draw the attention of the gods by making the victims scream as loudly as possible. There was a lot of exposure of children on mountain sides and not just babies. One little trick the Incas had was to make the children ingest a red toxin so that their last hours were excruciating with nausea and vomiting. The great empires of South and Central America were founded on the slaughter of Indians but death on a wide scale was imported by the Spanish and most of it was caused by diseases like small pox.
The Spanish were appalled enough at Indian behaviour to do a bit of their own torturing. They found the Indians to be poor slaves, weak, lazy and cunning. This began the African Slave Trade, another epic of misery.
So the interesting question is this. How much should children really know about these cultures? Well no one is going to make that cartoon are they? The thing is commercial, but is it really necessary to make them all talk like inane American high school drop outs? It seems that it is. Children prefer cartoons that they can identify with. Unfortunately there has tended to be increasing dumbing down in children’s entertainment. There used to be shows like Space Family Robinson whose plots were actually based on the Greek Myths and the Odyssey. There needs to be an argument advanced as to why it is necessary for cartoon characters to talk like idiots with unsavory views about people with mental illness.
In a society in which there is heated debate about the poor quality of school curricula and the absence of education in history, The Emperor’s New Groove is unlikely to do anything but push down the IQ of the population.
Idiot pictured
"Rollicking entertainment with several really good laughs for youngsters and a jokey hipness that should amuse adults." Kurt Honeycutt.
The latest way to feel good about killing the Indians is to make a cartoon like The Emperor’s New Groove. It is unlikely that the target children’s audience will know anything about Aztecs or Incas but at the end of the movie they can be guaranteed to know nothing more and what will be known will be a perverse parody of their own cultures.
Kuzco now figures prominently on Australian week end television and is extremely popular with children. Should they be told what the Incas and Aztecs were really like? This will give them nightmares. The cruelty of both Aztecs and Incas does not make pleasant reading, especially what they did to children. For example it was necessary when carrying out a human sacrifice to draw the attention of the gods by making the victims scream as loudly as possible. There was a lot of exposure of children on mountain sides and not just babies. One little trick the Incas had was to make the children ingest a red toxin so that their last hours were excruciating with nausea and vomiting. The great empires of South and Central America were founded on the slaughter of Indians but death on a wide scale was imported by the Spanish and most of it was caused by diseases like small pox.
The Spanish were appalled enough at Indian behaviour to do a bit of their own torturing. They found the Indians to be poor slaves, weak, lazy and cunning. This began the African Slave Trade, another epic of misery.
So the interesting question is this. How much should children really know about these cultures? Well no one is going to make that cartoon are they? The thing is commercial, but is it really necessary to make them all talk like inane American high school drop outs? It seems that it is. Children prefer cartoons that they can identify with. Unfortunately there has tended to be increasing dumbing down in children’s entertainment. There used to be shows like Space Family Robinson whose plots were actually based on the Greek Myths and the Odyssey. There needs to be an argument advanced as to why it is necessary for cartoon characters to talk like idiots with unsavory views about people with mental illness.
In a society in which there is heated debate about the poor quality of school curricula and the absence of education in history, The Emperor’s New Groove is unlikely to do anything but push down the IQ of the population.
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