LJWorld Reader blogs

The ancient Mayans were astoundingly adept with mathematics, construction engineering and calendars. According to their calculations the world will end Dec. 23, 2012.That date, as any attentive baby boomer can tell you, will come several years before the Social Security Trust Fund reaches imbalance, accepting the direst forecast of the Congressional Budget Office. So, if you are one of those people worried about retirement, I suggest you lighten up. You might also consider a little more extravagance with the Visa cards this Christmas, unless, of course, you are one of those increasingly rare persons keen on checking out with no obligations to Citibank.(A friend in the finance industry who calls me every night at supper time tells me some credit cards now give you frequent flyer miles if you use them enough. If you have one of those, you could shop, shop, shop and then fly to Chichen Itza to see the temples before it is too late.)A part of me hopes the Mayans were right. I'm not really impatient for Armageddon. But if it must come, as I suppose it must, it amuses me to think that polytheistic heathens addicted to human sacrifice could, when it comes to nailing the date, outfox all those Christians fervently longing for the End Times.I find it completely plausible that God would choose to blow that big whistle in the sky on a Mayan death date and then send to heaven only those among us who, thanks to the miracle of television, knew to send monthly remittances to preachers with funny haircuts and Dixie accents.The Aztecs, cultural cousins of the Mayans, were the goriest of all Mesoamericans. An example: They sent little corn cakes soaked in human blood as introductory gifts to Cortes. They thought he might like them.(I'm hoping someone at Krispy Kreme's marketing division doesn't stumble across that fact while under pressure to come up with ideas. I can imagine the ensuing meeting and Powerpoint presentation:"_Colleagues, the recent election has demonstrated that a significant portion of the American market has a previously unrecognized bloodlust that we believe could serve us well in the coming quarters. Soccer moms, those minivan drivers who still make most of the food-purchasing decisions in their households, went for Bush big time despite and perhaps because of the ratcheting up of overseas violence. Overweight white male office workers, our most reliable repeat purchasers, are also the identical segment most likely to rent or buy Hannibal Lector DVDs. Thanks to the influence of newspaper style sections and HGTV, affluent, well educated metropolitans on both coasts are showing increased interest in using their pocketbooks to celebrate the Day of the Dead, which only recently was solely an Hispanic segment phenomenon. And it goes without saying that generations of tradition have prepared for us very rich potential in the burgeoning Latino demographics. We are tentatively planning a Southern California roll out for our Day of the Dead cruller, a skull shaped, bloodsoaked delight which we think will take shareholder value to new and unprecedented heights_.")I learned about the Mayan "baktun" or Great Cycle of 5,130 years from reading "Tales of the Plumed Serpent" by Diana Ferguson. It is a book published for children four years ago in Great Britain.The book is well illustrated, including what I took to be a reproduction of some Nahuatl speaker's rendering of a man having his heart cut out with an obsidian knife. The patient was awake for the procedure.This is great stuff for the kids (those nasty little brutes), especially around bed time. You might want to add this book to your gift list. Remember: Put it on the Visa card!The book is about Incan, Mayan and Aztec myths. I've been a newspaperman for a couple of decades, so I have a technician's interest in how myths are perpetuated. (In my trade we are always striving to do better.)I've also been reading Joseph Campbell's 1949 book "Hero with 1,000 Faces."Campbell's contention is that myths are expressive of eternal and universal human truths. He put a lot of stock in Freud and Jung and other psychoanalysts' efforts to plumb the human mind, its hopes and fears. For some reason that strikes me as more dated and naive than some of the Mayan explanations of the universe.I think myths these days are interesting mostly for children and scholars. Hollywood pretty much left off with them when it abandoned westerns, replacing them with more intimate soap operas, cartoons and such. No more John Ford. No more John Wayne. I don't mean that to sound wistful. I was among the millions who grew tired of the western. I think it was an utterly exhausted genre for sustaining the American myth until George Bush came along and breathed new life into it. Even with that, it is probably on life support.Hollywood once in a while still does some knock-off or faux myth movies, especially when it has new special effects to demonstrate. But a really good myth, in my view, is a story people will repeat for at least two or three generations even if they aren't being paid to do it. And other people will listen, also without paying and take to heart in ways they don't always recognize.In my book collection I have a copy of "Early Day Kansas."It is a fascinating, little book, also written for children and full of legends and lore. I'm not sure that it counts as a book of myths because the yarns became neglected before they had time to be fully realized as mythology. But that little book, slanted as it was, might be the best we can do for a purely Kansas mythology. It was written by Bliss Isely, a Wichita newspaper reporter, and published by the Kansas State Teachers Association. My copy is from the eighth printing in 1956. The first printing was in 1927, so one can assume that thousands of young Kansas students read this book before it was retired from classrooms and libraries. If you were one of those students, I would be very pleased to hear from you. I'm curious how that book was used. I would also like to learn more about Isely. You might remember the chapters about Buffalo Bill Mathewson and Satanta, if you don't remember the title and author.I also would be delighted to hear from anyone who speaks Nahuatl. I've read that it is an endangered language but still used in parts of Mexico.Also... before I forget, let me thank those readers who posted suggestions and encouragements in response to my first blogged effusions..