Anyone who watched TV in the 1970s will remember the image: A morose Indian paddles a canoe through a polluted stream, a belching smokestack in the background. At the edge of a highway cluttered with litter, a piece of garbage is thrown from a passing car and lands at his feet. The narrator of the famous public-service ad intones: “People start pollution, people can stop it.” A single tear, shown in close-up, rolls down the man’s cheek.
The actor, Iron Eyes Cody, died last week, but the obituaries did not bring a tear to the eye. Talk about the politics of personal destruction. First, we learned that Iron Eyes never wanted to do the ad — “Indians don’t cry” he explained — but agreed to at the behest of Lady Bird Johnson. Second, the tear was not really a tear, but a drop of eyewash (is nothing sacred?). Last, Iron Eyes may not have really been Iron Eyes. In 1996, his half sister revealed to the New Orleans Times-Picayune that Cody was actually a second-generation Italian-American from southwestern Louisiana and that he created his Indian identity out of thin air. But “he always wanted to be an Indian,” his sister told the paper.
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Ciao, kemosabe.
