Fair enough.
/curtsies
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I apologize if my initial brevity came across as hostile in tone. That wasn’t my intent, but I can see how it sounded that way.
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I’ve always been in favor of election day being a holiday… but after election day 2016, I’ve decided that instead the day after election day should be a holiday (a “mental health” sick day, as it were).
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You know, maybe you should run, with actually-useful ideas like that.
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LOL QOTD Papasan. QOTD. 
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Everyone says that if they could go back in time they’d kill Hitler. I’d kill Columbus.
Oh, and I don’t know how I forgot this, but I know that several people asked the former mayor of Columbus, Michael Coleman, to change the name to Arawak City, the Arawak being the first tribe that Columbus “encountered.” There was also an Arawak City anarchist collective that put out a zine called “Columbus is Dead.” There was also this correspondence with the surviving hereditary chief of the Arawak.
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If not Columbus, someone else would have come along soon enough. The results would have been the same. North America was already in decline, with places like Cahokia, Chaco Canyon and other complex societies recently abandoned (relatively) when Columbus arrived.
I think this whole issue is reasonable backlash against the mythological version of Columbus that was taught for so many years. The only issue I have with it is we have turned him from a cartoon hero into a cartoon villain. neither portrayal is accurate. And doing the “noble savage” thing with the Native Americans also turns them into something they were not.
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&
(from Howard Zinn)
—
Columbus was an utter monster.
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Should be required reading in every school in the Western hemisphere at least, especially the USA.
And thank you.
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John Cabot, on the other hand, (born in the Republic of Venice, c. 1450, as Giovanni Caboto), did actually land on and explore the North American continent, probably Newfoundland, under the sponsorship of Henry VII, in the Matthew, the first European exploration since the Vikings in the 11th Century.
Unlike Columbus, Cabot knew there was a landmass there, fishermen from Bristol, where Cabot sailed from, were fishing off the Grand Banks, and putting into land to replenish food stocks and water.
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I mean, Columbus gets way too much credit for the so-called Age of Exploration. He didn’t really do anything new other than kick-start Spain and Portugal to start claiming things that didn’t belong to them. Cabot, and the Vikings, and Zheng He, and even the Greeks who measured the circumference of the Earth to fair accuracy did way more more than Columbus IMHO.
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They’d lose the Italian-American vote. Columbus day isn’t about Columbus, it’s about a once repressed minority being able point to a day and say “we are a part of this county, we matter.” They just happened to pick a shitty guy.
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I don’t know much about Columbus except that it’s the birthplace of one of my favourite writers, James Thurber.
(“hashtag factoftheday”, or whatever the kids are saying now.)
Rather than boosting one jingoistic holiday* by gutting another jingoistic holiday, it would be nice to see Columbus Day cease to exist altogether.
I know I’m treading on fairly sacred ground by saying that Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day (or Rememberance Day here in Canada) is jingoistic. But these holidays are. It has been 100 years since the end of WWI and 73 since WWII - while we’ve been lucky enough to avoid another global scale conflict, the message of “Never Again” doesn’t seem to come across very often. It all seems carefully crafted to make people feel guilty about questioning the purpose of the military or its role in society. Especially with the Orangutan in Chief in office**.
The idea of a National Indigenous Day is something that has had a lot of pushback from Indigenous people in Canada - reason being that a lot of the population will treat it as another long weekend, and won’t actually engage in any reflection on the topic. It doesn’t encourage any thought about the injustice that exists the other 364 days in the year.
So yeah, good for Columbus Ohio, but not sure they deserve a medal here.
*In a way, all holidays are jingoistic, or at least jingle-istic, that is their purpose. Bread and circuses and all that.
**I take that back, it’s an insult to orangutans.
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It does seem very difficult, psychologically and institutionally, to commemorate or celebrate something in a way that feels special without the thing itself becoming treated as sacred. Has anyone, anywhere, managed to circumvent or minimize that better?
Yeah, just one more thing…
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I know if I ran, instead of going after “the such-and-such group vote(s),” I would go about it differently and try to appeal to the intelligent and decent people who, shockingly, can be found in almost every group. Just like nasty people can be found in almost every group. As for Italians, I have some of that blood. Show me an Italian family, I’ll show you a whoooole lotta different personalities at play!
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The river was named for the character Columbia, not Columbus.
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