Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilization / Hamid Dabashi

SuperTruth® for the UltraBeliever

Are there any real mysteries left? Clearly, we’re not the doe-eyed, innocent public we once were, back when Howdy Doody and Alka Seltzer ruled the popular infotainmosphere. It’s not enough for things to be true anymore. Now they must pass a more rigorous test: the test of believability in the state-of-the-art laboratory of public opinion. And yet somehow there still remain unsolved phenomena to boggle the jaded mind, shake us out of our trances, and remind us never to trust our senses, our reason, our memory, or the evidence. We live in a truly miraculous time, when anything can be true.

But only the best things can be SuperTrue®.

The Barbed Wire of Eden

One sunny Sunday morning, archaeologist, Trudy Braznorkle, working overtime on a dig in the mountains of Afghanistan, found her garden trowel’s tip wedged, immovably, between a rock and hard thing embedded in the Afghan clay. The trowel stuck out of the earth at a thirty-three-and-a-third-degree angle. She put all the weight she could bring to bear upon it by standing on the handle with one foot. The trowel handle bent all the way to the ground before she released it with a “sproy-yoy-yoy-yoing” sound. She tried again. “Sproy-yoy-yoy-yoing!” She did it a few more times because she enjoyed hearing the sound.

Then the handle of the trowel broke off. She tried next with a pry bar and eventually removed the stubborn artifact from the clay. What she saw turned out to be confirmation of a very old, obscure legend.

A book of early apocrypha, The Shawarmas of Enochle, tells of a garden, recognizable as the selfsame Garden of Eden from the Old Testament book of Genesis. The description is reported by an ancestor of Noah (builder of the famous ark), Enochle, who recounts being told by Adam and Eve about the garden soon after they faced eviction from it.

It’s long been held by biblical scholars that Eden was the first gated community. Barbaric Australopithecans and other inferior hominids were denied entry. It may be that these brutes were early failed experiments by God himself. Even hobbits, cute and whimsical though they were, could not pass through Eden’s gate, nor gain ingress by digging a tunnel beneath the hedgerow. Boobytraps bristling with poison-dipped barbs would spring into the face of anyone foolish enough to try to... read more