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Can I get a little attention? Does anybody care this year? Seems like they would... this year, especially, but no... Anybody?

It's Columbus Day, but there's way less than the usual hoopla, even though you'd think there'd be more. I found this in the Washington Post, "Much of America has stopped celebrating Columbus Day, but the explorer remains revered in Italy." That's super mild. The observation that has replaced the observation of: There used to be an observation of the holiday, and now there's only the observation that the holiday is no longer observed.  

While many Christopher Columbus statues were toppled this year in the United States ? dragged into Baltimore's Inner Harbor, beheaded in Boston ? the towering marble monument to the explorer in his hometown, Genoa, Italy, is disturbed only by pigeons....

 ?Some vague awareness of his colonialist brutality has only in the last few years made it into classrooms,? said Marina Nezi, a recently retired high school history teacher in Rome. ?But [Italy has] a very long history, and school years are often not enough to tell the whole of it.?...  

?There?s a firewall of Italianness that has prevented the critique from breaking through and garnering a meaningful following,? [said Giulio Busi, author of ?Christopher Columbus, the Sailor of Secrets."] Toppling his statues ?feels like an attack on our nationality.?...

Did you know that with a firewall of Italianness, you can stop critique from garnering?   

In the New York Times, Christopher Columbus hasn't even been mentioned since October 9th. There's not even the observation that the holiday is not observed. Which is to say, it's really not observed. They didn't even see it. They didn't even see the non-seeing of it!

Now, the New York Post offer a cry for us to respect the old tarnished hero. It's a column by David Marcus:

Christopher Columbus wasn?t just the man most responsible for opening up the New World to the Old; he was also an example of the American Dream centuries before our nation was born... The upshot of Columbus? grit and courage is nothing short of the world we inhabit today, one in which Judeo-Christian values through centuries of churn and violence have led to the freest, most equitable and most prosperous nations in our planet?s history. There are those who say that Columbus didn?t live with our modern values. That is true, but it is also true that without Columbus, our modern values might very well not exist.... Don?t allow the naysayers who line their pockets with the outrage of the guilt steal from you the history that belongs to all of us; don?t fear their sneers or snide remarks. Christopher Columbus endured plenty of those in his own day, but rather than cower beneath the criticisms of those who were supposedly his betters, he trusted in himself, in God and in the limitless possibilities of human exploration....

The column is titled "Happy Columbus Day ? say it loud, say it proud." That headline. It's a riff on the old song, "Say It Loud, I'm Black & I'm Proud." I guess that's justified by the material about Italianness in general: "It?s a day to celebrate the contributions of Italian-Americans to our nation?s history. That was the original intent behind the holiday, after all, to elevate Italians at a time when they still faced marked bigotry." 

Full post as published by Althouse on October 12, 2020 (boomark / email).