That is last year’s video from after I read Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Morison. Here is the accompanying article I wrote with other book recommendations about the mariner’s life and career.
What do I have to say this year?
1: “Deconstruction” is not about truth.
Therefore, “deconstruction” is a lie.
As part of the broader pseudo-intellectual effort to retell American history as racist and bigoted, the effort to “deconstruct” Columbus Day cares little for facts. Deconstruction in general is about badgering you into accepting dogma—one that carries punishments if you don’t adhere. These punishments are mostly social in nature, but they can affect your employment depending on the structures that govern you. More often they’ll affect your interpersonal relationships, creating friction where it did not (and need not) exist. Ultimately that’s the objective.
2: Pick an argument.
Indigenous People’s Day, pitched as an alternative to (or even superior to) Columbus Day is meant to sound sensible, and to many of its celebrants it surely is. Yet its loudest and most obnoxious advocates will use it to generate that friction and elevate themselves over others. This is where you get pithy lines like “Columbus didn’t discover anything” and “They were already here.”
Yes, “they” were. That was never in contention, and it’s part of what he reported to his sponsors, the Spanish court. What he discovered was the continuous channel of contact between transatlantic peoples, which had not yet been established, as evidenced by the fact that no other European powers were in the region. Once he showed up, that changed forever (even though Vikings had been in America centuries before him.)
The majority of claims against him never stand up to scrutiny and never in the context that his critics present them. The same accounts on TikTok telling you Columbus was a murderer and slaver will also cackle that he never landed in America because he was dumb. If that latter is true (and it partially is), then the former can’t be. He never killed any Amerindians because he never set foot in America. He landed on a couple of islands in the Caribbean, and the most damning thing you can say about him is he mistook Cuba for Japan.
But his haters can’t explain why. They don’t read. They don’t learn. That isn’t their objective.
3: Intent vs Results
“Indigenous People’s Day” as a concept is not a problem; its placement on the calendar, however, is deliberate. Like the pithy one-liners, it’s meant to generate friction and divide people. The stated intention may be to highlight the pre-Columbian peoples who lived on the continent prior to his arrival, but the functional intention is to provide permission to accuse Columbus celebrators as [insert negative quality.]
“It’s anti-Italian discrimination.”
Columbus wasn’t a conqueror or a genocidal tyrant; he was an explorer who risked life and reputation to prove a point that was both spiritual and scientific. Columbus Day as an institution had several reasons behind it, one of which was to celebrate Italian-American heritage; setting aside the misrepresentation of his legacy, the placement of another heritage holiday on the same date isn’t going to unite anyone. It specifically pits two groups of people, and their fans (are we really doing this? Racial fans? Jeez you guys) against each other.
And if division is the goal, you’ll forgive me for not participating.
4: There’s a solution to this.
Look, as far as blood goes, I have no horse in this race—yet I am American, and I have ties to a range of people. My grandfather—Mom’s stepdad—was full-blooded Italian. Not an exaggeration. His parents were born in Naples and he was first-generation American, born in New Jersey. He never let you forget it either.
I’m 3/4 Appalachian hillbilly and 1/4 Mormon pioneer, so the best I can do is step-grand-Italian. Still, when Sopranos clips come across my feed, it’s hard not to look at Uncle Joon and think Damn, he looks and sounds exactly like Grandpa.
On the other hand, while I have precisely zero Native American DNA in my family tree (other than an unconfirmed claim of one random ancestor marrying into Powhatan’s line about four centuries ago), I do live in Oklahoma, where I gotta say, we have at least three or four American Indians here. They’re my neighbors, my co-workers, my fellow church members in the pew on Sunday. When I lived in Utah and Nevada, I had Native co-workers, and regularly drove through different reservations for work in the mines.
I’ve got nothing but affection for both peoples, and I understand the affection they hold for their preferred day on the calendar. I still celebrate Pioneer Day every July 24th, even though I only lived in Utah for a few years. It is part of my own heritage and it’s nice to have a day to sit with that. (Not that you’ve got to be Italian to celebrate Columbus, but you get it.)
Stacking both days on the calendar does, by design, make it a clash of narratives, with one side saying “Your day is about killing us,” and the other side saying “You’re accusing us of something we never did.”
So here’s my proposal: move Indigenous People’s Day to the Monday before Columbus Day. You don’t have to nix it from the calendar, and it even fits the motif. The Natives, or American Indians, or whatever term you prefer, were here before Columbus, right? So celebrate their day first, and celebrate Columbus on (or around) the day he set foot in the hemisphere. Friction removed. Both groups get their day. And in addition to that…
5: Trim the fat, as it were.
We should scale back the number of federal holidays. Frankly there are too many. By all means keep them on the calendar, but don’t make it a day where banks and businesses shut down. MLK Jr Day, President’s Day, Memorial Day, “Juneteenth” (good night above I hate that word, it sounds like baby talk), Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day…adding in the major holidays, we’re up to eleven federal ones.
MLK Jr. Day and “Juneteenth” (for the love of Pete, please change the name, call it ‘Emancipation Day’ or something) could be consolidated. Emancipation Day makes more sense because it’s about an entire group of people and not one single figure in the Civil Rights movement (albeit a significant one). President’s Day usually lands on or around Washington’s birthday, which is great and worth remembering, but I’d also agree with the case for removing it from a federal list, as blasphemous as that sounds. I’d rather we increase the focus on Veteran’s Day but that’s just me. Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day could also get their own focus for those who want to celebrate, without shuttering businesses for people who would rather not have the interruptions.
Let’s preserve those holidays for things like Independence Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Swap out Labor Day’s unique status for Veteran’s Day (although that gives us two hiccups in November, that’s something we can argue over.)
But we don’t need to argue over this. History is there for us to like it or not—and we have a duty to be honest about it. Yes, the Amerindians were already here, and many of them have preserved their cultures in the face of incredible hardship; they even faced outright genocide in some cases, but not from Columbus. He deserves his own recognition for the great things he accomplished.
The friction is optional—and destructive. That destruction is the real endgame of “deconstruction.” Dress it up, gentrify it, make it sound edifying, but that doesn’t change what it is.
I for one will not participate. You cannot make me hate my fellow man any more than you can make me hate my ancestors. Most of all, you can’t make me hate the truth.
I read too much for that.
Happy Columbus Day.