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Posted on 10/05/2001 10:18:55 AM PDT by ouroboros

Rediscovering Columbus Day

A few years and an age ago, schoolchildren still lisped, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”  Today, they’re taught, in the words of Robin West, author of Progressive Constitutionalism, “[T]he political history of the United States…is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexist devaluation of women, and a less than admirable attitude of submissiveness to the authority of unworthy leaders in all spheres of government and public life.”  God bless America.

Though Columbus Day is now little more than an excuse for department store sales, it’s a wonder our calendars remember it at all.  Members of the National Council of Churches have voted to denounce the explorer’s arrival as an “invasion” and suggest repentance for the “genocide, slavery, ecocide and exploitation” Columbus brought ashore. The U.N. refused to acknowledge the quincentennial anniversary, and even the Smithsonian revised its remembrance of the discovery – er, encounter – from celebration to commemoration.

Once a fixture in the hall of heroes, Columbus is now recast as a spoiler who stumbled upon the Western hemisphere in a misbegotten treasure hunt.  But it wasn’t always this way.  On the tercentennial of his landing, New York’s King’s College was renamed Columbia, and our capital city was called the District of Columbia, an honor some wanted extended to the whole country.  On the 400^th anniversary, President Benjamin Harrison hailed Columbus as “a pioneer of progress and enlightenment.”  Irish Catholics organized the Knights of Columbus, praising the explorer as an “instrument of Divine Providence,” and the “Columbian Exhibition and World’s Fair” opened in Chicago to national applause. Forty percent of the country’s population attended.

But by the five-century mark, a seismic shift had occurred.  Garry Wills observed in the New York Review of Books, “A funny thing happened on the way to the quincentennial observation of America’s Discovery …. Columbus got mugged.  This time the Indians were waiting for him.  He comes now with an apologetic air – but not, for some, sufficiently apologetic …. He comes to be dishonored.” Historian Hans Koring penned a New York Times op-ed headlined, “Don’t Celebrate 1492 – Mourn It.” Jan Carew wrote in Columbus: The Rape of Paradise that he "introduced slavery to the West and set off a legacy of shame and racism that continues to this day."  

What knocked the pedestal from beneath the Admiral of the Ocean Sea?  Why should a figure once revered now be reviled?  It wasn’t some just found foible or long lost journal. Columbus hasn’t changed.  We have.

The microwave mentality of the modern age has little use for history, thus our hunger for heroes now settles on rock stars and sports celebs – the glitterati of the moment. Gossip has replaced greatness.  National myth is no more. 

For generations weaned on multicultural mush, a European, who by their books inaugurated a racist past, is inferior to the eco-friendly, peace-loving peoples he encountered.  (Fast forward past the historical evidence that they were warlike practitioners of human sacrifice and slavery.) With pluralism enshrined as its own end, diversity strips national character of common icons. We no longer rally around a shared past because history retold fractures us into descendants of noble victims and guilty conquerors.  The revision reads like a balance sheet of grievances.

“The hullabaloo over Christopher Columbus,” writes Robert Bork, “is one more manifestation of the war in the culture.” The revolutionaries secure ascendance by contrasting a shameful history with their own goodness.  Thus they control the future by capturing the past, and the rootless majority makes the suicidal buy-in.  But even Columbus knew better.  Late one night, after a Christmas storm destroyed the Santa Maria, he wrote in his ship’s log, “In all the world, I do not believe there is a better people or a better country.” From the earliest days, ours is a glorious memory, checkered but inspiring, and though prevailing winds beat hard against it, we must never stop trying to take back. 

Happy Columbus Day.

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