Columbus Day Revisited

"Hi. I didn't even do what I thought I did."

I saw the Sopranos rerun last night where the Italian Americans and Native Americans in New Jersey get into a literal fistfight over what kind of a guy Columbus was. We just had Columbus Day a week ago, which my federal employee wife likes to celebrate by staying home and sleeping, so I’ll weigh in:

Fuck Christopher Columbus.

I just thought I’d make my position clear on that. I don’t need to go on at length on this. Thousands of perfectly good trees have this man’s ruthlessness and incompetence written on their flattened corpses like a ruined epitaph. Each book on the man is like a mass grave.

What interests me, and by “interests me” I mean frustrates me, about dialogs like this is the utter pointlessness of them. There are plenty of great people of Italian heritage who didn’t rape and pillage their way across the West Indies. What’s the point of clinging to this one? It’s a misplaced sense of identity caused by stereotypical cultural associations. But I’m Irish and therefore a raging alcoholic; so don’t just take my word for it.

I’d submit that the point isn’t this man or that event when it comes to conversations like this. It’s what we cling to in order to differentiate ourselves from each other. Take the south, for example. I grew up in Memphis, and I’m still amazed that people actually wear rebel flags in the 21^st century. When I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, I actually had someone tell me that he and his friends “y’know, still sport the confederate flag sometimes.” I think he wanted to make me feel at home. My initial mental response was an incredulous “Thanks for picking a side in a fight that we settled 150 years ago, but I don’t think Nebraska was even a state then.” Sticking with a losing team is charming when you’re talking about Redsox fans, but these “Gray Ghost” guys just seem sad and more than a little creepy. It’s not like we’re going to replay the Civil War just to accommodate a handful of jarheads living in a past they don’t seem to fully comprehend. At least Boston gets to take another shot at the World Series every year.


"Wait, pickup trucks are the product of industrailization
and not slave-based agriculture? Well, shit!"

What sustains people through these flights of the mentally bizarre must be our enormous and only occasionally taxed capacities for denial. I’ve actually had a white coworker tell me that because some Africans participated in the slave trade, whites weren’t morally responsible for their own part in it. This is what I’m talking about, right here. He was trying so hard to come up with a rationale for something that his brain actually became incoherent. Oh sure, the sentiment is grammatically correct and formed in English, but it still makes no sense when you say it out loud. It actually breaks down when you expose it to oxygen.

It’s fairly well documented that “Ending Slavery” was the “real” reason for the Civil War the same way “Finding Weapons of Mass Destruction” was the “real” reason for Gulf War II. Now, I’m not saying that the end result of emancipation wasn’t as worthy as keeping the country from tearing in half, but what I am saying is that twisting history into something more noble doesn’t accomplish what we’d like it to. Now that the ending slavery and the Civil War are linked as primary cause and effect in so many minds, the lingering resentment over the loss of the Confederacy in some is redirected towards those that seemed to profit from it: Don’t like the way the war ended? Too bad, it was over well before you were born. However, African Americans do live here currently and they are free now at the expense of “dear ol’ Dixie”... (Cue the goddamn violins.) Or so the apparent thinking goes, anyway.

People try deconstructing unpleasant pieces of history from other angles, too. “Maybe the slaveholders treated the slaves well.” This is akin to saying that a rapist is an OK guy as long as he makes sure his victim’s head is resting on a pillow. "Maybe there’s nothing morally wrong with slavery.” Try grabbing someone off the street and forcing him to vacuum your house for three days and see how that little idea holds up in court. So instead of displacing blame, these efforts try to magically absolve it altogether. My coworker’s attempt at constructing a sentence falls under that category of nonsense. To be polite, I guess you could refer to this as a kind of rhetorical deus ex machina. Reality didn’t shape up the way some would like it to, so they’ll just refuse to process it or even pretend something else occurred instead.

I’ve even heard revisionists from the Confederate apologist camp actually claim that some black troops actually fought for the Confederates during the conflict. How would that even work? Ang Lee’s Ride With The Devil (featuring a single black raider and set in the non-state territories) aside, the established Confederacy passed laws that black troops captured in battle were to be hung as escaped slaves. Slave owners didn’t even want their blacks reading books, but I’m supposed to swallow that they were willing to give them guns? That crashing sound you hear is that notion collapsing under the weight of its own stupidity.

But as I said earlier, this pernicious nostalgia for things that never happened is as unnecessary as it is factually erroneous. I grew up in the south, and I never felt the need to apologize for the lousy parts of its history as much as I felt the need to understand them. If I want to be proud of where I’ve come from I think about our artists. We gave the world the blues and rock n’ roll. We’ve given the world Mark Twain, H.L. Menken, D.H. Lawrence and William Falkner. (Well, maybe I’ll apologize for Falkner, but I’m not going to pretend he never existed.) Some places back home are doing so well economically that some Yankees actually move south (only this time they’re not referred to as carpetbaggers). Our Democrats are some of the most battle-hardened liberals in the country, and our Republicans can kick your Republicans’ asses. Our overcooked vegetables actually taste good. Plus, we keep manners alive so the rest of the country can remember how to use them if they ever decide to, again. With all of that and more to appreciate, why in hell would I waste my time and energy trying to defend the Alabama state flag? It’s not even particularly well designed.


If we can get past this
we can get past anything.

The fact is that as a culture (and even more so as a species), we’ve made lots and lots of mistakes. I know that we’d like to pretend that Vanilla Ice never had a top ten hit, but I’ve got pictures of you from junior high dancing to Ice Ice Baby in the five minutes that it took you to realize that the sampled bass line from Queen’s Under Pressure didn’t actually make the song worth listening to. Most people don’t go around pretending that Rob Van Winkle didn’t pick an even goofier stage name and put one over on us. We certainly don’t walk around constructing elaborate reasons why that track actually rocked. We give each other shit about having liked the song and get on with our lives. If we can come to term with such trivial pop culture embarrassments, why can’t we just admit our ancestors have screwed a lot of things up and gotten a lot of things right. Especially considering the end result on our quality of life will hurt only as much as admitting a lot of us once owned copies of To The Extreme.

So southerners, be proud of who we are, and quit trying to justify every detail of what we were. Nobody else on the planet is still watching Gone With The Wind while curled up with a box of Kleenex. Italians, the rest of us do know that white guys with MBAs, not fat guys named Vito wearing tracks suits, commit most of the organized crime in this country. Give the anti-defamation league a rest; it’s turning into a bigger joke than The Godfather: Part III. As a people, Italians have given so much good to the world, I’m surprised we’re not still speaking Latin conversationally. Finally, to the two Irishmen who were offended earlier when I made that crack about alcoholism, I was drunk when I wrote it and I’m sorry.