There is a movement underway to erect a statue in honor of Vasco Nunez de Balboa in Balboa Park, in that part of the Kumeyaay Nation territory commonly called “San Diego.” San Diego Union Tribune columnist Logan Jenkins calls attention to the campaign to create a bronze statue for Balboa in his March 8 2016 column, “Time to put Balboa on a pedestal.”

The idiom “to put someone on a pedestal” has quite a number of synonyms including “worship, dignify, glorify, exalt, idealize, ennoble, deify, apotheosize.” A question arises: Does Balboa’s legacy warrant building a monument holding him in high regard? I’ll return to this question in a moment, but first let’s set the context which explains what’s going on with the U.S. society. After all, we need a context that helps explain this mad proposal for a statue honoring Balboa, a conquistador who performed a superstitious ceremony claiming possession of the entire Pacific Ocean for Spain because he managed to be the first Spaniard, and thus, the first representative of Christendom and “humanity” to lay eyes on it from the Isthmus of Panama.

In his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), Chris Hedges says that the society of the United States is a “culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality” (p.?). The desire on the part of some people in San Diego to build a statue to Balboa, including the wealthy patron who wants to spend more than $300,000 on the statue, perfectly illustrates the point made by Hedges. The proposal for such a statue is an example of the dominating society’s illusion being separated from reality. For it is only by ignoring the reality of what David Stannard calls the “American Holocaust” in his book by the that title, that a statue celebrating Balboa can be proposed with a straight face.