A Fine and Dandy Columbus Day

"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food , water, gifts." 

So begins one of the most important books in United States history. The great American historian, Howard Zinn, goes on to present to his readers a slightly illogical excerpt from Christopher Columbus's travelogue. 

They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things... They willingly traded everything they owned...  They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

If you grew up going to an American public school, chances are you were misled to believe Christopher Columbus was a hero of the world. Why else would we have a day off on a national holiday named after him? If we were to look at a hero Richter scale, he must've been somewhere next to Zeus. It wasn't until later that most kids found out that Columbus’s men used native people as dog food, or that his men were made up of rapists and murderers, and that many Americans opt out of Columbus Day and celebrate Indigenous People Day instead. In fact, Hawaii, Alaska and South Dakota have not celebrated Columbus Day in years. 

Because after all, what exactly is the United States celebrating? Christopher Columbus never even set foot on American soil. Surely we can't be celebrating his discovery of American land. He clearly wasn't a model of a man, unless genocide and enslavement are supposed to be the national paragon. (Although, looking back, genocide and enslavement were kind of like the midwives of the modern United States.) Perhaps we're supposed to be celebrating Columbus's imperialistic spirit. Ah, there we go. That makes much more sense. Imperialism and hegemony are a call for celebration. Without those two national virtues, as Howard Zinn's historic treasure tome elegantly suggests, the United States would have forever remained just a twinkle in the founding fathers' eyes. Howard Zinn sagaciously expresses:

My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly excercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessay price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.

Sounds like the United States could use a national dose of Amzonian medicine. Of course atrocities should not be suppressed, on an individual or national level. The suppression of centuries worth of atrocities can result in a mythic amount of sickness (self-loathing and possibly nauseousness). Celebrating Native American Day instead of the killer of Native Americans, as California has moved to do, might have the potential of redirecting the giant ship of a morally lost nation to the land of, well, sense.