Christopher Columbus: Bad or Good

I am not here to sully the patron saint of gabagool (pronounced capicola), or to suggest we rename holidays or tear down statues. We're just going to discuss some facts - some commonly known, others not so much. Then we can make a full determination on the life & legacy of Christopher Columbus, the director of Home Alone. I can't cover everything here, so if you are upset that something positive or negative was omitted, or that I casually glossed over something you deem important, please email your mom. 

Columbus was an Italian explorer with several big boats who convinced the Spanish to finance a trip to the Far East, after which he'd be entitled to a cut of whatever colonial enterprise & trade routes he subsequently established. But he landed in the Bahamas like a big dingus and called everyone Indians. This is the "spacing everything double to meet the two-page minimum in Word" of exploration. Subsequent trips included exploration of several islands in Central & South America. Weirdly enough, my man here never set foot in North America. More on that a bit later. 

I learned in school that Columbus' journey proved the Earth was not flat. Nope. Everyone knew the Earth was a big round bag of water, and had known for some time. We can blame Washington Irving's The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus for skewing our history books. Columbus, to his credit, was well versed in geography & astronomy and knew he wouldn't yeet his fleet into outer space. Of course, it didn't stop him from mislabeling an entire hemisphere for centuries to come. Columbus thought the Earth's circumference was a fraction of its actual size. Easy mistake.

To be serious for a moment, Columbus' legacy is complicated due to a variety of factors. It's difficult to accurately document everything that transpired before we had iPhones. I mean, Amerigo Vespucci got two whole continents named after him when historians have speculated that his trips over here were bullshit, and that he stole from other explorers. That, and if Columbus hadn't boated here to do some light genocide to native islanders and enrich the Spanish Crown, someone else certainly would have. 

That's an important point that isn't so much a valid defense of Columbus, but an explanation of the hegemonic structure of Europe and the motivation to expand spheres of influence. Someone was going to come here and fuck shit up hard. If it wasn't Columbus, it would have been Giuseppe Stromboli or whatever. 

Columbus was tall in stature, with light skin, freckles, blonde-reddish hair, and blue eyes. Not what you thought, right? All along I sat here thinking this dude looked like Furio Giunta. Instead he probably more closely resembled Napoleon Dynamite. If we leave the statues up, they need a makeover. 

Okay, back to "history" here. 

Where Columbus went wrong, among other things, was prioritizing profit over his stated desire to access trade routes and spread the Good Word of Christ. He actually neglected to baptize indigenous peoples whom he enslaved, which angered Church figures that supported his excursions (they wanted BAPTIZED slaves, thank you very much). These Church figures ultimately share blame for the very atrocities that correctly stain Columbus' legacy.

Columbus' brutality has been amplified as of late with society's shift toward wokeness and consumption of actual history. On St. Croix, coined by Columbus as "island of the Holy Cross," people aged 14 and up had their hands cut off for failing to pay enormous taxes to their new lords. St. Croix's "indigenous" name is AY AY. Again, not big on renaming things, but that's a great name and we should consider it. 

While Columbus' brand of brutality & enslavement certainly led to the depopulation of his landing spots, he murdered far fewer people than the diseases he (and later Hernan Cortes) brought with him. Natives were savage - not in the pejorative sense - these people could fight like hell. The Vikings came here hundreds of years earlier than Columbus and had their shit wrecked by American Natives. They just forgot to bring plague rats. This is why we have no statues of Thor. 

Historians differ as to whether Columbus is guilty of deliberate genocide. Applying present-day morality to those of the 1500's would indict anyone with power. But the fact remains that 90% of the indigenous populations of the American continents was wiped out within a century of his arrival. That's an extermination. 

Now, the big question. Is Columbus a genocidal maniac whose statues must be torn down and his name banished from good, polite society? Good question. 

Columbus was one man. As I alluded to earlier, if it wasn't Columbus, it would have been someone else. Catholic Monarchs are believed to be the first group or entity to license the African slave trade to the Caribbean. The Catholic Church, of course, has a complicated history of its own! We don't need to reach back to the Crusades or the African slave trade to question the reputation of our beloved Church. Church leadership presided over the systemic rape of young boys on an incalculable, global scale. That was recent! 

But as you may know, we have not canceled the Catholic Church. Why? Because we can't. It's as indelible in Western Society as McDonald's, a hulking monolith with billions of adherents worldwide. How many statues of saints, and how many parishes built across the Americas, would have to come down to "cancel" Catholicism for the crimes of colonization, genocide, slavery, and child rape? Too many. So we just go "oh man, that's pretty fucked up" on our way to Midnight Mass. 

Columbus is something of a cheap, easy target. You can't cancel Jesus. But you can cancel one goofy fair-skinned boatman. It's often (or entirely) overlooked that Columbus was arrested and returned to Spain in chains and subsequently stripped of his nobility. Spain CANCELED him. So why are we fighting over Columbus so much? He's just one guy, a cog in the wheel, a very big wheel of death. Because we have to. 

History is funky, and the cultural significance of its figures can be traced along a winding road. As mentioned earlier, Columbus never set foot on the future United States of America. New York's Tammany Hall held the first commemoration of Columbus landing in the Americas (again, not here), but the holiday itself was a one-time celebration on the 400th anniversary of his voyage. This was a hasty make-up move by the President at the time after Italian immigrants were murdered in a mob lynching in New Orleans. The move was primarily designed to ease tensions with Italy. 

Italians faced intense discrimination in the late 1800's, culminating in events like the aforementioned mob lynching (which was one of many). Columbus, at the time, was something of a cult hero for Italians. Bestowing a holiday in his name, and erecting statues in his honor, were reasonable concessions. Italian-Americans will be quick to say "see! our people suffered!" without conceding that these concessions were a product of power maintenance, which is why no such concessions were made to black Americans. 

Fast forward to today, when every topic gets hand pressed through the blades of the culture war. Columbus is canceled! His atrocities against indigenous Americans have been brought to light! His statues are no longer welcome. A terrible wrong has finally been righted! Has it? 

I can't speak for Natives - hell, as a straight white guy, I can't speak for anyone. But Native Americans had their lands poached, their people murdered for sport and for profit. Columbus was one man. But the oppressive machine that took everything from them, all the way down to their pride, persisted. The power structure that enabled the massacres of indigenous peoples and Africans alike continued on unabated, with hardly a cancellation in site. Burying Columbus in the grave of history is the "I'm Helping!" meme of activism.

Worse, it comes off as a "dunk" on Italian-Americans who believe he was a "product of his time." Columbus was less a product than an active participant in brutal tactics, and was an especially harsh person guilty of at least several atrocities. But his statues were built and holiday decreed as an olive-branch to heal the wounds of discrimination at a time when this country was slowly building its future as its own hegemonic power on the shoulders of immigrant labor. 

Which is funny, considering many of the same people who vehemently defend Columbus on behalf of their immigrant ancestors are virulently opposed to present-day immigration. Forgive the straw man here, but you know who you are. "bUt tHeY cAmE hErE LeGaLLy" is a weird flex when there were no rules and 400 unskilled Calogero's a day arrived here fleeing poverty & persecution. 

So, where does that leave us? 

The systems and structures of institutional oppression that facilitated countless wrongs throughout history are far more difficult to dismantle than the memory of a single, violent actor. Correcting these wrongs is even more difficult. Which is why we casually throw bones at the afflicted parties and say "see? you can thank us later." Changing the Washington Football Team's name and renaming a federal holiday, while certainly welcome in some circles, just allows polite society to pat itself on the back. 

I derive an inordinate amount of pleasure from leg-dropping on Columbus because it agitates the right people, but I'm at the point where fighting over the legacy of a single guy every year is grating. I don't have the answers. I just think we're all wasting our time, which is what you and I just did.