COLUMBUS DISCOVERS... POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Five centuries ago Columbus discovered America. Five centuries later, in our mentally disturbed age, he is discovering the dismal downside of his historic discovery: political correctness.

The noxious cloud of political correctness has descended upon his memory in today’s America, despite all the efforts of the Italian-American community to keep his name alive and in good standing. Alas, with his record of imposing Spain’s will on the indigenous population of the island of Hispaniola and on a few other outlying areas, there is no longer any hope for him to remain a hero of Western Civilization in the land that he had once discovered.

Perhaps such hypersensitivity to the violence of history can be justified by the sheer brutality of the Spanish conquest? No, considering the levels of violence, and its implicit and explicit glorification in the essential stock of modern American culture: the movies, such rejection of it elsewhere is nothing short of hypocritical and demeaning to common sense. Besides, considering the time when Columbus floruit, his sins are mild in comparative terms. After all, don’t we recognize the acceptability of brutality in the Bible, or the legitimacy of slavery in America up until the formal adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution at the end of the Civil War, with the continued indignity of segregationism in the American South until quite recently, etc. On the other hand, by succumbing to selective sentimentality over the unpleasantnesses of certain historical events, we could well end up censoring out our historical memory with the end result of forfeiting the bulk of our national culture, losing the ability to experience cultural continuity, and to benefit from the priceless lessons of the past.