Hernan, you motorboatin' son of a bitch!
From Cryptonomicon:
"Very funny." Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does rarely. Also, he's in the midst of cataloging another small-h holocaust site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some fucking solemnity here. "I visited Mexico a few weeks ago," Avi continues.
"Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch of Aztecs?" Randy asks.
"This is exactly the kind of thing I'm fighting," Avi says, even more irritated. "No, I was not looking for a place where a bunch of Aztecs were massacred. The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves,"
"The Aztecs can go fuck themselves," Randy says cheerfully, drawing a baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.
"To begin with, I was hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former Aztec capital. I was on the outer fringes of the territory that the Aztecs controlled." Avi scoops his GPS off the boulder and begins to punch keys on its pad, telling it to store the latitude and longitude in its memory. "I was looking," Avi continues, "for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish even showed up. You know what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"
Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. "Something unspeakable?"
"I hate that word 'unspeakable.' We must speak of it."
"Speak then."
"The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."
"Why?"
"Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don't know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that's why."
"Don't tell me you're about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."
"As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there."
That's one of the reasons I love the Aztec-Spaniard battle. It's like comic book supervillains squaring off, the Joker vs. Dr. Doom (DC vs. Marvel!)
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