Apocalypto Now

Tonight I took a break from both rule of law work and Cobra II reading to watch Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. Set in the Yucutan Pensinsula just before Spanish contact, the film depicts one man's experience during the decline of the Mayan civilization. In brief, a young tribesman named Jaguar Paw escapes human sacrifice, outruns/outfoxes/outlasts (just like Survivor!) his pursuers, rescues his wife and children, and takes them deeper into the jungle as the first conquistadors and missionaries arrive on shore. It's a beautifully shot movie -- at least if you can call so much violence and gore beautiful -- and keeps you riveted in your seat.

As I sit here processing it in my office, where I stopped on my way back to my trailer, it's tempting to make parallels to the environment in which I find myself. That analogy goes something like this: Here we are in this ancient civilization in decline (or stalled), as Western knowledge, science, and faith (this time secularized into broad Judeo-Christian values) arrives to save it from itself -- or kill those parts that are unreformable.

That is, like the American natives, the Arabs' civilizational development stalled at a point the Europeans (and Chinese!) had passed centuries before. (The Persians and Central Asians are different cases, the former a more developed country hijacked by fanatics -- the latter lacking the petrodollars that skew Middle Eastern geopolitics -- so I'll leave them aside for now.) This line is appealing, but it's probably much too superficial: The Mayans/Aztecs/Incas (/tribes of North America) never attacked Europe, nor did they somehow acquire the technology Europeans were using.

Or did they? The New World natives did eventually adopt European methods of fighting, working, and playing (guns, horses, whiskey), and inflicted heavy casualties and reverses on the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English (later American) colonists. Yet these losses did not forestall the manifest destiny of a more developed political culture -- much like it's hard to imagine al Qaeda and its ilk (or even Iran) wiping the West off the map even as it brings terror to New York, London, Paris, and especially Tel Aviv. (Though the enemy now is less scrupulous than was the Soviet Union -- which was an immediate existential threat -- it also doesn't possess thousands of ICBMs.)

Hmmm... food for thought, which is more than one would expect from what is at its core a "chase" movie.