The Curse of Gold: From Sipán to the Stars and Stripes
The greatest tragedy to befall the indigenous peoples of Central America was not the clash of armies, but the glint of their own gold catching the eye of Cortez from his Spanish Galleon. In Sidney Kirkpatrick’s The Lords of Sipán, we see the staggering abundance of precious metal these civilizations extracted from the earth—masterpieces of craftsmanship that sealed their doom. That wealth summoned the basest instincts of humanity: conquerors eager to raze entire societies for personal gain.
This pattern is etched into the human story. Wherever prosperity blooms, predators with superior force descend to devour it. Recall King Hezekiah unwittingly tempting Babylonian envoys by flaunting Israel’s gold-filled treasuries (2 Kings 20)—a display that foreshadowed plunder. Or consider modern echoes: vast tithes funneled into megachurches, only to attract grifters who siphon them dry. As Scripture warns, “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10)
My two paintings of Cortez capture this conquest in stark relief:
1. Cortez, eyes ablaze with greed, hovering over Aztec gold hoarded at the heart of their sacred temples.
2. Cortez torching his own ships on the Veracruz shore, stranding his men with no retreat—commitment forged in avarice.
They obliterated a vibrant culture: erased like dust in the wind. The gold was seized through atrocities unimaginable. Diseases—unintentional at first with the Spanish, later weaponized deliberately by the British against North American tribes. Another civilization vanished, its echoes silenced forever and gone with the wind.
These images invariably summon Neil Young’s haunting ballad Cortez the Killer, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most unsettling anthems:
“He came dancing across the water / With his galleons and guns / Looking for the new world / And the palace in the sun.
On the shore waited Montezuma / With his cocoa leaves and pearls / In his halls, he often wandered / With the secrets of the world.
Cortez what a Killer.”
No treasure trove in history rivals the one forged by these United States. For the past seven decades, we’ve watched modern scoundrels infiltrate, manipulate, and redirect it for their private empires. Our greatest literary sentinels issued dire prophecies in the 1950s—Harper Lee’s moral reckonings, Ayn Rand’s philosophical alarms, Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical grenades—all methodically ignored. We were too preoccupied, too distracted, too complacent in our abundance to heed them. And now? A culture in terminal decline, puppeteered by the very forces we were warned against and for the second time in our 250th year history a culture gone with the wind.