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Columbus Day

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It’s hard to be less interested in Columbus Day than I am, but so many mellifluous fools in my blogroll whine in childish little voices about how Columbus was mean, horrible and not a Santa Claus that I feel like celebrating just to avoid being one of them. Especially since it’s the Day of Spain, also known as Hispanic Day.

As for Columbus, yes, he wasn’t extremely enlightened, which is not that weird given that the fellow was born centuries before the Enlightenment era. But if you can’t admire the tenacity and dedication of somebody who pushes on even when nobody else believes in the project, then that’s your problem, not Columbus’s.

One has got to be all sorts of stupid to condemn 15th-century folk for not sitting there, doing nothing out of worry that some overfed idiot centuries later might disapprove. And hey, how sure are you that people of the 26th century will find everything you say and do to be perfectly acceptable?

21 responses to “Columbus Day”

  1. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    The best response is indifference. You can pull this post out at Thanksgiving — the Canadian and the American. People actually celebrate Thanksgiving in a meaningful way (capitalism takes a small breather), whereas Columbus Day is just a bank/government holiday and an opportunity for sales.

    Columbus Day in the United States exists as a federal holiday because of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus — an Italian-American organization.

    As for Columbus, yes, he wasn’t extremely enlightened, which is not that weird given that the fellow was born centuries before the Enlightenment era. But if you can’t admire the tenacity and dedication of somebody who pushes on even when nobody else believes in the project, then that’s your problem, not Columbus’s.
    There’s a book called Leadership Secrets of Atila the Hun as well as one for Genghis Khan why not one about Columbus? 🙂

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    Columbus by Ogden Nash

    Once upon a time there was an Italian,
    And some people thought he was a rapscallion,
    But he wasn’t offended,
    Because other people thought he was splendid,
    And he said the world was round,
    And everybody made an uncomplimentary sound,
    But he went and tried to borrow some money from Ferdinand
    But Ferdinand said America was a bird in the bush and he’d rather have a berdinand,
    But Columbus’ brain was fertile, it wasn’t arid,
    And he remembered that Ferdinand was married,
    And he thought, there is no wife like a misunderstood one,
    Because if her husband thinks something is a terrible idea she is bound to think it a good one,
    So he perfumed his handkerchief with bay rum and citronella,
    And he went to see Isabella,
    And he looked wonderful but he had never felt sillier,
    And she said, I can’t place the face but the aroma is familiar,
    And Columbus didn’t say a word,
    All he said was, I am Columbus, the fifteenth-century Admiral Byrd,
    And, just as he thought, her disposition was very malleable,
    And she said, Here are my jewels, and she wasn’t penurious like Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, she wasn’t referring to her children, no, she was referring to her jewels, which were very very valuable,
    So Columbus said, Somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it,
    And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it,
    And the fetters gave him welts,
    And they named America after somebody else,
    So the sad fate of Columbus ought to be pointed out to every child and every voter,
    Because it has a very important moral, which is, Don’t be a discoverer, be a promoter.

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  3. richmondguide Avatar
    richmondguide

    The explorers of that era may not be angels, but neither were the people they came into contact with. This news article, is not about Columbus- it’s Cortes, but I think it is pertinent.

    As a young student, I read Howard Zinn’s books and was absolutely horrified by the enslavement and mistreatment of Native peoples. Discoveries such as the above may not vindicate the Europeans totally, but to me it at least lends a missing piece of the stories.

    Maybe historically speaking, everyone was a jerk?

    http://www.archaeology.org/news/3791-151009-mexico-zultepec-tecoaque

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Zinn is great on many things but specifically on Columbus he was writing out of his ass. Also, his idealization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, especially in what concerns the position of women, is a disappointment. But he’s great on many other subjects.

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  4. Michael Blekhman Avatar
    Michael Blekhman

    My mom sang me this Russian students’ song about Columbus,

    Колумб Америку открыл.
    Ошибку сделал он большую.
    Дурак! Он лучше бы открыл
    На нашей улице пивную.

    This means something like this:

    Columbus opened (discovered) America.
    It was a big mistake.
    What a fool! A much better idea
    Would have been to open a pub in our street.

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  5. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    My view is that these people are being childish not because they’re whining about him being a mean person, but that they’re whining about a mean person 500 years ago. I mean, seriously.

    Genghis khan was an order of magnitude more brutal than any mass murderer in history. And we make jokes about him, and even admire his ruthlessness (wow, what a badass this motherfucker was). There’s enough historical distance there. Note that we can’t do the same for, say Hitler. Yet. That would be in poor taste, to say the least.

    Columbus belongs to the same category as genghis khan in my opinion. Enough time has passed. Get over yourself, you don’t know anybody who was directly affected by him. Or even whose great great great great grandparent was affected by him, for that matter. What’s next? ‘Adam and Eve really fucked it up for the rest of humanity, wah wah’!

    It’s just signalling at this point: ‘I’m more virtuous than you’. In order to gain social capital, I suppose (‘retweet this message pls’).

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  6. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “It’s just signalling at this point: ‘I’m more virtuous than you’. In order to gain social capital, I suppose (‘retweet this message pls’).”

    That’s pretty much it.

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  7. Dreidel Avatar
    Dreidel

    It’s also rather hypocritical, since Columbus started the ball rolling on European colonization of the Western Hemisphere, which ultimately led to the creation of all the countries now on the North and South American continents.

    Every single one of the indignant American progressives who are caterwauling today about Columbus Day and the subsequent conquest of the indigenous natives are happily living on land taken from those natives, and none of these “progressives” have any desire to give an inch of it back.

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    1. ladyfiaran Avatar
      ladyfiaran

      I agree, I can respect Native Americans who are upset about Columbus but not white people precisely because we’re all living on original Native American land. These are the same sorts who complain about Native American mascots but won’t go on a reservation to help anyone, put the bell on the cat or get off.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        “Every single one of the indignant American progressives who are caterwauling today about Columbus Day and the subsequent conquest of the indigenous natives are happily living on land taken from those natives, and none of these “progressives” have any desire to give an inch of it back.”

        • Exactly. We are all sitting right here on this continent, happy as clams to get a chance to be here. For many, the opportunity their ancestors got to come here was an enormous benefit. Why shall we start pretending that it is not true, all of a sudden?

        I hate hypocrisy. And I really hate it when people try to impose the values of today retroactively on history. This is entirely idiotic.

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        1. Stringer Bell Avatar
          Stringer Bell

          “And I really hate it when people try to impose the values of today retroactively on history.”

          Me too. Which is why I never liked your argument in defense of Israel’s actions. Something like the US did it too in its nation building, so why complain about what Israel is doing now. Need to break a few eggs to make an omelette (note: breaking eggs means oppressing a weaker people, like always).

          Apologies if I am mischaracterizing your argument but that’s the gist of what I got.

          And my reply to that has always been, yes, the US did what it did hundreds of years ago and its actions have to be situated in the overall historical context. US not giving voting rights to black men, or white women in the past does NOT make it ok for a country in 2015 to do the same to a segment of its population.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            You confuse stating a fact with approving of this fact’s existence. 🙂 When I say that this is how nation-states are created, it doesn’t mean I think it’s a positive thing. I didn’t emigrate to Israel and am not moving back to Ukraine precisely because I don’t want to participate in anybody’s nation-building. I find the cost of that process to be too high.

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            1. zeppomanx Avatar
              zeppomanx

              “You confuse stating a fact with approving of this fact’s existence”

              This insight could be the start of a book of aphorisms that explains some of the problems of political or any kind of discourse.

              Another, more troubling observation might be “To disapprove of a fact often requires denying it is a fact.” (I am thinking of any number of denial themes)

              Anyway, cool phrase.

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                “This insight could be the start of a book of aphorisms that explains some of the problems of political or any kind of discourse.”

                • Thank you. 🙂 I encounter it often in my teaching. Students seem to think that mentioning something horrible like genocide or war is akin to supporting it.

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          2. Dreidel Avatar
            Dreidel

            (Sigh) Do we have to bring up Israel again, in a post that’s supposed to be about Columbus Day?

            Israel isn’t oppressing anybody. It’s a legitimate democratic nation that was created by the United Nations in 1948 on a portion of British territory voluntarily given up by the UK, which also offered the Palestinian Arabs the rest of that territory for their own Palestinian State.

            Instead, the Palestinians have chosen perpetual war, and have squandered every opportunity to make peace with their civilized, modern neighbor. They still are.

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              It never works like this. In any protracted situation of violence, both sides participate and have a need of that violence (see my recent post on domestic violence).

              I have relatives and acquaintances in Israel and I can say this: what the government of Israel is doing to the Jews of Israel is criminal. The Jews, who are already historically traumatized to an enormous degree, have to live in an environment of artificially manufactured fear (not of Palestinians even but of the rest of the world), terror, suspicion that is driving them literally crazy. And that is not OK. Tragic historic trauma experienced by the Jews is being exploited by the government for the purposes of nation-building.

              As many people here know, my grandfather emigrated to Israel back in the 1990s but then had to come back, even though, that would pretty much be a death sentence for him because of his health, because the environment there was impossible to tolerate. He was looking for Eretz Yisrael and found something that was not worthy of the name.

              And mind you, I’m not even mentioning Palestinians here. I’m talking about people I know, people I grew up with and who went to Israel and eventually turned into somebody I don’t recognize and don’t really want to know. The point of all this is supposed to be to create a safe place for Jews. But few places on the world are more dangerous for Jews than Israel. So what is the point then?

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                This is a very fraught, difficult issue for me on a personal level as a Jewish Ukrainian. Which is probably why it keeps cropping up in many unrelated threads. It’s my own personal return of the repressed. 🙂

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              2. Dreidel Avatar
                Dreidel

                Well, I’m not Jewish and am not at all familiar with internal Israeli affairs. But Israel’s external, 67-year-old perpetual conflict with the Palestinian terrorists should have been forcefully brought to an end decades ago, instead of being allowed to fester forever.

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      2. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        “These are the same sorts who complain about Native American mascots but won’t go on a reservation to help anyone, put the bell on the cat or get off.”

        What kind of argument is that? Complaining about redface is not dwelling in the past. Which was the point of this post by Clarissa. Good job not getting it.

        Would you say the same thing to someone complaining about entertainers performing in blackface? ‘Go to a inner city project or shut the fuck up.’ Note that the protests against native american caricatures of mascots are led by native american people themselves. It’s not some imagined protest that some do-gooder liberals (your favorite strawman!) whipped out of nothing. As if before some white progressives showed up native americans didn’t have any problems with racist caricatures.

        We all have our emotional crutches. For some liberals it might be to cry racism at every opportunity. For some conservatives it is to pick out the tiniest bit of hypocrisy in the opposition’s argument to make them feel better about their rotten positions.

        Tell us more about what bugs you, ladyfiaran. Those liberals talking about institutional racism? White men having to control their speech at the workplace by actually having to use words like ‘women’ instead of ‘broads’, or ‘homosexual’ instead of ‘fag’?

        OMG, this PC culture will doom us all.

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        1. ladyfiaran Avatar
          ladyfiaran

          Dude, I got spanked as a kid, bullied in high school and listen to Anal Cunt, so people complaining in general annoys me. I understand when Native Americans are upset about mascots, but when I see liberal white people complaining about it, it makes little sense. It doesn’t concern them on a personal level and some of the more conservative Native Americans might actually find it offensive to see white people butting into their business. Yes, the mascots may be offensive but there are bigger issues to worry about at the moment.

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        2. ladyfiaran Avatar
          ladyfiaran

          PS, if someone called me a broad or a spicy, I’ll call it right back if I don’t kick their ass first. I learned that in high school, Jebus bless NJ public schools

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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