Is America the New Babylon?

I just returned from a visit to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. And you know what I found there? Evidence that the supposedly hedonistic, evil world of Babylon is something of a myth when it comes to how people really lived their lives.

You may recall that the Bible paints the kingdoms of Babylon as the ultimate in evil; hedonistic, wanton, murderous and the antithesis to God.

And if you look only at a sampling of events such as wars and dramatic stories from the Bible, then the image of Babylon as the whore of history may be true. There were merciless kings who ruled the ancient Middle East. There were kings who engaged in great wars against other countries and committed incredible slaughter as conquerers.

But between all that vile behavior, archaeology shows that people living 4000-2000 years ago pretty much busied themselves raising families, making pottery and metal goods, cooking food and trading stuff of other value. Along the way the Babylonians and other ancient cultures in the vicinity of Iraq invented languages, developed writing and created art that lives on in our culture today. Not a bad legacy.

See, history has a tendency to reduce our image of ancient cultures to what amounts to a cultural sound bite. If you hear nothing about Babylon except stories of orgies, sex and murder, then you're ignoring much of what the people in those ancient cultures really accomplished.

For some folks it is an easy and convenient way to bolster their own historical self image and moralize against a society that consistently threatened a pet culture like those in Israel and Judah. But we forget a couple things in this worldview. One: The Bible was largely written from the cultural perspective of the Jews, and two, many Israelites actually wound up living amongst the Babylonians for decades, even centuries. Sometimes even when you lose the war, you gain a little culture in the process.

What I saw in a visit to the Oriental Institute were artifacts representing thousands of years of life on this earth before Jesus Christ got around to paying us all a visit. Surprisingly, seeing all that old stuff makes it seem to me like the last 2000 years went past in the blink of an eye. It is also important to realize there were at least 2000 years or so of good solid cultural development going on before Jesus came along to utter the Beatitudes and make mockery of the Pharisees for behind holier than thou.

Evidence shows that Babylonians and a whole host of other kingdoms kept pretty busy making cool pots and decorating them with designs they appear to have been exported to Australian aborigines, or else they stole them outright. But speaking of things stolen from antiquity, did you know that the ancient Babylonians also invented those claymation characters Gumby and Pokey. I've got proof in the first photograph you see with this article. That's a clay image of Gumby riding Pokey for sure. That show always haunted me, I must admit. Perhaps there's an ancient Babylonian curse running through the script.

But speaking of Saturday cartoons, it looks like Babylon beat us to the punch there as well. Take a look at the figurines in the next photograph. The guy on the left looks like Barney Rubble and the gal on the right must be his Wilma or Betty. Or both. Because as I learned at the Oriental Institute, Babylonians did believe in spreading a little good sex around.

Check out those Babylonian swimsuit models in picture number three. They're wearing topless monokinis right off the south Riviera. And, if you look closely at the last picture you'll see there's a session of good old doggy style humping going on. The Babylonians dug sex so much they created claymation pornography to celebrate it. I guess if you wandered in from Jerusalem where the Pharisees were calling everything under the sun a sin, you might have found Babylon a little shocking. But really, what's the harm in a little clay pornography? We celebrate the Venus of Willendorff as a sign of early human awareness but castigate the depiction of a nice pair of knockers on a Babylonian clay doll? That's hypocritical if you ask me.

Yes, the Babylonians were into icons and idols for sure. But then, what would you have done if you had 2000 years to burn while you hung around waiting for writing, money and religion to roll your way. Come to think of it, we're still doing the same things today...

I guess you can can sort of see why people who are uptight about a solid work ethic and keeping sex within marriage get a little freaked out by the whole Babylonian scene. It seems that middle-class Babylonians really were a lot like middle-class Americans today. They just wanted to get their freak on and have a little fun and probably would have thought the Flintstones and the Simpsons were funny stuff gauging from the subject matter of Babylonian art.

What does all this mean to modern America? It turns out we have plenty in common with Babylon, but it isn't necessarily all bad stuff like those moralizing creeps might have us think. I'm sick of religious zealots obsessing about America's downfall and the "coming Armageddon."

If anything, American has improved its moral baseline the last 40 years through changes like the civil rights movement and cultural tolerance. These are products of a progressive culture whose recognition of the human condition feels no need to demonize others in order to establish and maintain the freedoms--social, religious, sexual and otherwise--so wisely guaranteed by our Constitution.

There were people screaming that the world was ending 2000 years ago and they same type of people are still screaming today. Here's my prediction: 2000 years from now people in museums will be looking at our crapand say, "Hey look, in 2007 hey worshipped a pair of gods named Brangelina. And look, the Americonians fought an 8-year war in the land they used to call Babylon. I wonder if they were jealous of their history or something and wanted to show them up?"

It's time to dispense with the narrow-minded, apocalyptic view of America as the "new Babylon," as if that were somehow designed to whip us into shape. Instead, we should recognize that the people who lived in ancient Babylon were just like us in a lot of good ways as well as the bad. They were inventive, artsy and like to have a good time. Sounds like a good weekend in any American hot spot.

I think Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and the other Founding Fathers would have like the Babylonians just fine. I do sometimes wonder sometimes how much the Founding Fathers would like some of the so-called Americans trying to run the country like a moral penitentiary today.