On this fraught Columbus Day, let us speak of the ways we invest Columbus with symbolic significance, either as a hero or a villain, a significance he did not have in his own day. (The refashioning of Columbus as an Italian-American Hero, for instance, is both touching and pathetic.) Let's also take a cold, hard look at the ways we have transformed the Arawaks et al into Indigenous Peoples, of a uniform innocence and purity opposed to the grasping, violent Western Conquerers.
[Hypothesis: At some point the specter of Rousseau would appear, casting his shadow over all that came before him. Just a thought.]
None of this is to suggest that Columbus was a particularly pleasant fellow, and it wouldn't surprise me if he was at once barely competent and ridiculously violent in the administration, so to speak, of his domain. But it's annoying all the same that there can be no dispassionate assessment of a rather complicated history.
For my part, this yearly masochistic thrashing of the guilty dead has bored me from the first time I encountered it at the university twenty-three years ago. Imagine a yearly fit of hand-wringing over the sacking of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths, or the conquest of North Africa by the Vandals. Our Columbus Festival, wherein we excoriate his memory to purge ourselves of the guilt of having been born on this side of history, is just as stupid.
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