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From Boadicea to Pinochet
Thursday, January 8th, 2009 03:20 pmI mentioned in a previous entry that I was looking for texts on how Boadicea became a legend. As I suspected, it seems as though anyone can make anything they want of her, including her name (Boudicca, Bodica, Bunduica—no one seems to know what she was really called, though you could probably classify authors' opinions by the way they spell her name). For feminists, she's a "strong woman" resisting male domination and avenging the rape of her daughters; for nationalists, she's a symbol of British resistance to foreign aggression. Elizabeth I and Victoria were both fans for obvious reasons. For skeptical historians, she is perhaps an example of how people can go gooey over tall red-heads while ignoring all the innocent people they massacred.
Paul Johnson in his book Heroes (an extract of which I read in the Daily Mail) provides a neat summary of Boadicea's life and subsequent incarnations. What struck me, though, was the part where he mentions some of his other personal heroes, including a fruit seller who has swum the channel several times for charity and General Augusto Pinochet. As Oberst Steiner says in The Eagle Has Landed, "I can always tell a thorough-going bastard when I see one," and one clue is admiration for Pinochet. Pinochet is a kind of masonic handshake for totally evil people: "Well you have to admit he put the Chilean economy back on track." "Ah, you are One Of Us. Come this way; the child sacrifice is waiting." It's a more modern and less obvious code than "Hitler made good motorways" or "Nero was a damned fine musician." The really funny thing is that Johnson describes the president before Pinochet as "my friend Salvador Allende." So this guy has your friend killed and then becomes your hero? This is the kind of thing that might happen in a Jacobean tragedy, but only when the protagonist doesn't know that the knave has killed his friend; once he finds out, it's revenge all the way to the last act where the stage is strewn with bodies.
So can we really find out anything about people from the company they keep or the heroes they worship? Obviously not in the case of Boadicea; an attraction to this warrior queen can indicate romantic nationalism, hard-core feminism, or just a dislike of Colchester.
Paul Johnson in his book Heroes (an extract of which I read in the Daily Mail) provides a neat summary of Boadicea's life and subsequent incarnations. What struck me, though, was the part where he mentions some of his other personal heroes, including a fruit seller who has swum the channel several times for charity and General Augusto Pinochet. As Oberst Steiner says in The Eagle Has Landed, "I can always tell a thorough-going bastard when I see one," and one clue is admiration for Pinochet. Pinochet is a kind of masonic handshake for totally evil people: "Well you have to admit he put the Chilean economy back on track." "Ah, you are One Of Us. Come this way; the child sacrifice is waiting." It's a more modern and less obvious code than "Hitler made good motorways" or "Nero was a damned fine musician." The really funny thing is that Johnson describes the president before Pinochet as "my friend Salvador Allende." So this guy has your friend killed and then becomes your hero? This is the kind of thing that might happen in a Jacobean tragedy, but only when the protagonist doesn't know that the knave has killed his friend; once he finds out, it's revenge all the way to the last act where the stage is strewn with bodies.
So can we really find out anything about people from the company they keep or the heroes they worship? Obviously not in the case of Boadicea; an attraction to this warrior queen can indicate romantic nationalism, hard-core feminism, or just a dislike of Colchester.
