I came across this little gem of an exchange on a prominent conservative blog where United States Congressmen regularly post.
Whoah there, Gamecock, you just went from 0 to Howard Dean in about five seconds there. Back up a second. I didn’t say I agreed with all the comments Galeano made. It was an extremely one-sided piece that failed to credit Columbus for his legitimate accomplishments as a navigator and explorer. It also portrayed the Spanish conquests only from the perspective of the brutality of the Spaniards, without discussing the brutality of native civilizations. In the case of Mexico, Cortez defeated the Aztecs largely because he had thousands of Indian allies who joined him because they were fed up with abuses on the part of the Aztec overlords.
On the other hand, none of this has anything to do with the United States. Columbus neither discovered nor settled the area that became the continental United States. Nor is it true that without his discovery there would have been no United States (as you claim). The fact is that by 1492 improvements in European navigation made discovery and settlement of North and South America a dead certainty. Indeed, the Vikings (as we know now) had already discovered Greenland and Newfoundland sometime in the late 10th century. Moreover, Northern European fishermen from England, France, and Holland were already fishing the waters around present-day New England at about the same time the Spanish were conquering Mexico and Peru. So there is no reason to think that the colonization of those areas depended on Columbus’s exploits.
As far as Columbus day being an American holiday, who cares? The Knights of Columbus and the Italian-American community, that’s who. In 1892, as waves of Italian immigrants began pouring into this country, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation asking Americans to recognize Columbus’s achievement in some way. He didn’t specify how, nor did he make it an official holiday. But over the following decades the Knights of Columbus, an Italian-Catholic civic organization, became lobbying to have it recognized as a holiday throughout the country. Several states, including New York, obliged them, but it didn’t become an official U.S. holiday until 1971 (cough, Nixon had an election to win the following year, cough, cough). In all seriousness, it makes about as much sense for Americans to celebrate Columbus day as it does for us to celebrate St. Patrick’s day, Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, or Valentine’s Day (or even, dare I say it, MLK day?). And we have those noxious holidays for the same two reasons that we have Columbus Day. First, there are certain vocal communities within our society that insist, loudly and angrily, that the rest of spend time recognizing their achievements and heritage. Second, American retailers make a whole boatload of cash from these holidays.
So in conclusion, you can celebrate Columbus Day if you want (although I doubt you actually do celebrate it in any meaningful way). If you’re Italian, I don’t begrudge you the chance to connect with your inner Tony Soprano. Heck, if you just need a day off, any excuse will do. But don’t try to pretend it’s a patriotic thing, because that’s a load of crap.
A precedent embalms a principle.
- Disraeli
Gamecock responds:
Your claim is not logical. Columbus represents our tie to western civilization and how its virtues, including the discovery and conquest of our land that led to our founding
and our becoming the Beacon of Liberty, all of which the author is trashing by a historical fiction that lables Columbus a savage and the natives gentle.He is suggesting it would have been better if Columbus had not come. To beleive that one has to believe that the world would have been better off.
That is insane, ie leftist world view. The view that hates America.
The thread continues in this vein for approximately fifty posts, becoming increasingly heated, denying anything negative from the historical record. A number of the posters even go so far as to claim that it is because of the United States that any country in the world has freedom. The position seems to be that either everything about Western history is good, or everything about Western history is bad. This argument wasn’t simply between two people, but a number expressed Gamecock’s sentiments. Incidentally, Gamecock is apparently an editorialist for his local newspaper. The first poster, apparently a highschool history teacher, provides all sorts of historical references to back up his claims throughout this fifty post exchange, yet is simply rejected for being critical of Gamecock. My question is this: In what possible universe would it be possible to have productive dialogue with such people? What is it that is going on here? What generates these sorts of beliefs? It is incredibly difficult for me to understand such people, yet they’re also extremely common here in the States. Is this something unique to our historical moment?
I will not link to the original site where this discussion took place. Having witnessed how members of these groups sometimes go after people personally, it’s best not to engage them at all. Free Republic, for instance, today posted the home address of the mentally disabled 12 year old boy used in the SCHIP commercials. Nice folk. I’d be happy to send the link through email to anyone curious to read the entire bizarre thread. It’s an excellent example of a certain structure of ideology. I tend to think that such texts are often more valuable than the work of ideological critics such as Althusser or Zizek… Or rather, that the work of ideological critics does not amount to much if you’re not familiar with these sorts of non-academic discourses.
October 10, 2007 at 1:17 pm
While I don’t think the internet created this, I do suspect that we’re hearing people who weren’t heard in public before–unless through the voice of their chosen demagogue–people who were just an entrenched and impenetrable in their views as the Freepers and their kin, who,if they found themselves outside of their own circle, or clearly outmatched, would sit by and hold their peace, fermenting in their ressentiment.
It might once have been tempting to believe that this class was made up of the powerless, uneducated, culturally deprived, and cognitively deficient. As you can see from the web page cited above, there’s no comfort in that now. These are people well positioned, educated, powerful.
I don’t think we’ve even begun to understand the dynamics involved–the factors that shape such minds.
October 10, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Yep, this is the scariest part. These people are well paid political consultants, lawyers, business owners, etc. I’ve spent the last three years reading these sorts of things and it’s been an eye-opening experience.
October 10, 2007 at 2:36 pm
[...] Rhetorical Problems– Columbus Day and Peru. So there is no reason to think that the colonization of those areas depended on Columbus [...]
October 11, 2007 at 2:19 am
Moderator! Please kill this! I’m going to post an edited version
Asufficiently documented or understoonother source that someone should keep a record of for analysis: the “Comments” left to the major on-line news outlets: CNN, ABC etc…
You get the same sort of Ignorance-over-Evidence arguments–with an even deeper sense of how this has opened to public exposure what has been out there all the time.
Second only to my primary reaction: We are doomed!… is the more important question.. as this is a new snapshot of the political ecology, not a new phenomenon ( or is it?)… how have we not managed to kill ourselves off before, as we seemed bound to a collective death wish that not Freud nor Lacan nor Zizek nor anyone has seemed to have d?
October 11, 2007 at 2:51 am
A sufficiently documented understanding of another source that someone should keep a record of for analysis: the “Comments” left to the major on-line news outlets: CNN, ABC etc…
You get the same sort of Ignorance-over-Evidence arguments–with an even deeper sense of how this has opened to public exposure what has been out there all the time.
Second only to my primary reaction: (We are doomed!… ) is the more important question.. as this is a new snapshot of our political ecology, not a new phenomenon ( or is it?)…
…how have we not managed to kill ourselves off before, as we seemed bound to a collective death wish that not Freud nor Lacan nor Zizek nor anyone has seemed to have accounted for?
I mean that as a serious question. Is it only because we didn’t yet have the means?
No… we could have done it with missiles and thermonuclear warheads 45 years ago…
Do we have some deep need to live on the edge of extinction?
Pinker ! That’s how our species lived for most of our history, right?
That we survived those first x-hundred thousand years on the edge… does that meant we are programmed to recreate our original survival conditions to the end?
October 11, 2007 at 2:54 am
“… cutting daisy’s with swords… “
October 11, 2007 at 4:16 pm
LS,
Thank-you for this post, I am all too familiar with this type of thinking having been witness to it many times in different venues. I don’t know whether this is a relatively new phenomenon or not, but I think that it bears a striking similarity to fundamentalist Christian thinking. It seems as though new information can only be accepted form certain sources, of which neither you nor I seem to be. That many believe education to be something that stops once a symbolic sheaf of paper is conferred upon them (including the teachers themselves), is certainly an issue worth consideration.
I think that we are surprised by the fact that it isn’t just the ‘uneducated’ and ‘poor’ who are duped is our own mistake. I think by now we should know that there are all stripes of doctors, lawyers, political analysts that have done quite well without ever having to think or act independently of the track laid before them, and in fact their success might even be attributed to an unquestioning following of rules/myths/ideology/whathaveyou.
October 11, 2007 at 5:32 pm
One source I’ve been following for a few years is the Family Research Council’s daily newsletter (which you can read here: http://www.frc.org/itemtype.cfm?it=WU).
They recently published this brilliant little rhetorical gem:
Is There a Doctor in the Car Bomb?
Terrorism has visited us in so many unexpectedly horrible ways in recent decades that it’s hard to imagine it has anything new in its repertoire. Then come the recent attacks in London and Glasgow to dispel that thought. British authorities have now arrested what a reporter has described as a “multinational circle of medical workers,” all men, all Muslim, a number of them doctors in Britain’s National Health Service. In a column in today’s New York Sun, FRC Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment Ken Blackwell writes about a central fact of Britain’s health system that foster these terrorists’ entree to the country and ability to avoid suspicion. “Foreign doctors,” he writes, “are given top priority and almost immediate entrance into Great Britain. In fact,” he notes, “they make up nearly 40% of all British doctors.” The reason for the extent of this phenomenon is that “the provision of free medical care through a government-based system has created a patient demand that exceeds the health care supply.” As the United States is tempted to move toward a system of national health care, the British situation offers another example of the law of unintended consequences. As Ken argues persuasively, America will do better with alternatives that emphasize family ownership, competition among service providers, and conscience protections – with enhanced national security as a by-product.