Monday was Columbus Day (“Indigenous Peoples’ Day” in more virtuous liberal enclaves). While the network evening news shows kept what we can only imagine was an embarrassed silence about the day and the man, the old Italian navigator took the expected beating. And not just from vandals. The lefty press had a go as well.
Armed with agenda-driven revisionist history, the left has been tearing Christopher Columbus down for 30 years, choosing various aspects of his story and legacy to attack. A popular target this year was the explorer’s standing with Italian-Americans.
Yesterday, for example, at Quartz John Mancini said the “misguided expression of ethnic Italian pride, Columbus Day (Oct. 9) has as much validity as a US national holiday as one devoted to Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis.”
Misguided? Well, yes. The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix condescended to explain that the embrace of Columbus as “critical to the formation of Italian-American identity … may be authentic, but it is based in parochial revisionism.”
It seems that – are you sitting down? – Columbus’s “logbooks famously showed that his fleet never touched the shores of what would become the United States.” So is the imputation that Italian-Americans are “famously” ignorant? Or perhaps they’re just “famously” prone to narcolepsy and slept through the universally taught lesson that Columbus landed in the modern day Bahamas?
Thanks Gaia our betters at outlets like The New Yorker and Vox are there to set us straight about Columbus. Vox cited TV host Adam Conover, who informs us it wasn’t until the American Revolution that “an incompetent and vicious nobody became the national hero we celebrate today.” Speaking of vicious nobodies, Conover, swallowing the simplistic lefty narrative, dismisses Columbus’s post-discovery career as “sail[ing] around the Caribbean murdering indigenous people.”
At The Nation, a journal of the moonbat left, Edward Burmila further explains “The Invention of Christopher Columbus, American Hero.”
“When the need to develop a national history with no discernible connection to Britain arose during the Revolution, early Americans seized upon him,” Burmila said. The Genoan was dragooned into American mythological service because “almost nothing was known about Columbus in the American colonies at the dawn of the Revolution, and this worked in his favor.” Good thing, too, since in Burmila’s estimation,
He was neither an especially talented mariner nor a success at founding a colony in the New World. Other than to allow him to begin bouncing around the Caribbean doing capricious and cruel things to its inhabitants, his famous voyage accomplished little.
By the way, notice all the slights of Columbus’s seamanship? It’s not enough to run down his character when you can disparage his navigational theories too. Conover asserted, “He set sail because he was a doofus who was terrible at math. Instead of trusting the experts, Columbus believed the Earth was thousands of miles smaller than it actually was.” Liberals love their experts. We can all be grateful Columbus didn’t. It’s easy for people who people probably couldn’t find the bathroom without Siri to criticize one of the great calculated leaps into the unknown a human ever made. Can’t wait until the Apollo space missions get their inevitable liberal makeover.
The Nation calls Columbus “a mediocre Italian sailor and mass murderer.” But, just so you know where The Nation is coming from, the very next article after Burmila’s mourns that “It Has Been 50 Years Since Che Guevara Was Murdered.” It’s co-authored by Bill “Boom-Boom” Ayers.
Of course, arguments against celebrating Columbus are as old as his popularity with Italian-Americans. It’s just that, back then, they came from the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothings and KKK. The Politics makes strange bedfellows. These days, the Klan is mostly a memory, or a fund-raising bogeyman for left-wing activists. Italian-Americans have reached the heights of American achievement and status in government, industry and the arts.
It’s funny: we know that to the left, Columbus doesn’t get to be a hero because he wasn’t a victim. Maybe Italian-Americans don’t get to have Columbus as a hero because they refused to remain victims.
