Discovering Christopher Columbus

TWO DAYS AFTER "Indigenous People's Day" came and went, a notion struck me that I had missed out on the big holiday. I must have slept through the parade and fireworks, somehow. Invitations to local celebratory parties failed to arrive in time or got lost in the mail, and neither I nor any of my neighbors put up decorations. What happened? Someone pointed out, quite correctly, that seeing Christopher columbus as a mass murdering genocidal criminal is nothing new. His priest, who was with him on at least one of his four voyages, wrote in his journal that he feared for divine retribution against the whole enterprise, based upon his belief that murdering or maiming eight million human beings, regardless of their primitive, barbaric, unsaved lifestyle, would find favor with neither God nor Jesus. One must admit, he had a point. When Columbus got back to Europe after his final adventure, Europe, especially Spain, which had funded him, had had quite enough. Too many nightmarish, fully corroborated anecdotes. Christopher Columbus got in big trouble, and stayed in it for the rest of his life. By the time these United States of America was born, hagiography had taken over. Columbus had become a hero, his vast crimes swept under the rug, so to speak, where they remained for centuries, until, actually, rather recently. Nobody ever told me the truth about Columbus, none of my teachers, from grade schhool through European history graduate schhool. I was on my own. Finally, Howard Zinn came to my unenlightened rescue, in his massive seminal work "A People's History of the United States", I think he title is. The fact that we now acknowledge the great explorer's genocidal tendencies has, at long last, come home to roost, as it were. Finally, at long last, we accept the truth, having exhausted all other options, to paraphrase Winston Churchill. Permit me to hazard a bit of speculation. I'd bet my house that the above named "indigenous people's, variously known as "Indians", "savages, and "redskins", would be quite willing to return their "Indigenous People's Day", in exchange for the tens of millions of their people who were slaughtered by European bullets and diseases, and for the millions of acres of land stolen from them. You can damned well keep your pandering "Indigenous People's Day". We can agree that naming a holiday after somebody hardly compensates for grand land theft and genocide. Good try though. I once got into an argument with somebody concerning the actual number of native American who lived in North America at the time of Columbus, and the number of them slaughtered in the manner noted above. Its an argument nobody can win. Nobody knows, or ever will. In the first paragraph of his journal, Columbus wrote, paraphrased: "We dropped anchor and waded up on to the shore. We were soon met by a large number of natives, naked savages adorned only in gold trinkets. they were beautiful people, quite friendly, and would have done anything for us. They are going to make excellent slaves." Ungrateful for the hospitality, Columbus promptly stole their gold, cutting off an untold number of fingers, hands, legs, and arms to get it. Conservatives would have us regress to the name "Columbus Day", and resume our celebration of a genocidal criminal. No dice. The cat, as they say, is out of the bag. We can't offer proper redress by returning the stolen land and stolen lives, but, by God, we can honor their souls by trashing Columbus and honoring their memory with a name change. Its the best we can do, but hardly enough.