October 11, 2004

Columbus Day

2000

2001

2002

2003

Columbus Day is a holiday in trouble.
Of all the official national holidays it has the most mixed-up constituency, and the most freighted historical premise. My reading of it has always been skeptical, in essence arguing that historical revisionism is a necessity if the Holiday is to survive.

Survival is a strong word, and once something is written into law it’s not going to easily be gotten rid of, but a holiday that fails in its intended mission will morph into something else, something unintended. As I suggested back in January, what is critical for Columbus Day is that its transformation must be by way of a dialectical confrontation with its dark side, which may be effected through our recognition of a polarity between Columbus and Martin Luther King Day.

I stated the basic problems of the holiday in 2000: bad history and colonialist arrogance; Europeans as an invasive species. In 2001 I found in it a warning against making assumptions about any “new world,” in this case the one widely proclaimed a month earlier that year. 2002 found me extolling the virtues of the vacant lot, a space with all the potential that Europe found in America, and receiving a similar degree of respect. Last year I used Columbus the navigator as an excuse for presenting my map of the Park’s north end, but I couldn’t help pointing out that Columbus was a navigator who didn’t know where he was.

When I make recourse to MLK Day, it’s to argue that we do know where we are today, or at least we’re better oriented that our ancestors who took such pride in the subjugation of a continent, with so little introspection regarding the consequences. In offering up King’s holiday, we show that we’ve learned (at least symbolically) to honor the equality of the people we once felt justified in annihilating or enslaving. Columbus Day must be guided by King Day, as a ship on night waters is guided by the fog-piercing beam of a lighthouse. And even though that light be kindled more in the realm of the ideal than the actual, heading towards it will bring us to good harborage.

Otherwise, we leave the whole mess to the Italians.
Not that I have anything against Italy or its people. But as I explained in 2000, Columbus, the Spanish agent, who couldn’t even make a successful career as “discoverer of the New World,” is hardly an optimal choice as culture hero for the people who produced Rome and the Renaissance (Michelangelo Day, anyone?) More to the point, the language in the US Code only refers us to “the anniversary of the discovery of America,” nothing about Italian heritage. I’m in no position to criticize Italian-Americans for sailing in the wake of the occasion, but it remains a fact that no other ethnic holiday is coincident with a national holiday. People are free to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, or Steuben Day, or Pulaski Day, or any nationalist or ethnic holiday they wish, but they don’t get to have it tied to a governmentally endorsed day-off-with-pay. It doesn’t seem quite fair.

To a great degree, our ethnic holidays have been reduced to a series of cliché-ridden, corporate-sponsored parades. But when Central Park was young, a century and more ago, many of the celebrations took place within its confines. The only evidence remaining is in the statues the ethnic associations funded, scattering in bronze the culture heroes of many nations across the Park. Four hundred years after Columbus the tide of European immigration was peaking, and celebrating European entrée to the “Land of Opportunity” seemed like second nature. Today it’s worth noting that many of the most vital parading communities in town are of a decidedly “post-Columbian” sort: the Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Caribbean celebrations generally make the Old World affairs look stodgy, as the hybrid children of Columbus continue the immigrant trend, in the process transforming the very world their native ancestors saw transformed by the arrival of the Europeans. Not so much an irony as an historical dialectic at work in real time.

If Columbus Day can deal with such tricks of time and circumstance, then it has possibilities, even if they are forced upon us. The holiday will survive, I do not doubt. It already has a long memory, referencing the most distant event among all our national holidays, with the exception of Christmas. Christmas was once more of a spiritual holiday than an historical one, but we have remade it into a celebration of consumer culture. The source of Christmas is four times more distant than Columbus, and maybe so many centuries will always give way to mythology, but some would say our current Christmas is less than Christian. Columbus Day too is changing, but as Christmas shows, the course between transcendence and trivialization is not always clear. After all, trivialized or not, Christmas has become both our biggest holiday, and the one most representative of our character. Whether Columbus can come through the straits of history with as much potency remains unclear, but he will do well to navigate by the light of Dr. King’s day. In the new world opened by our youngest holiday we may yet find the redemption of our beginnings.

- alex 10-11-2004 1:58 pm


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".... I would think that this too-extreme selectiveness would be bad for keeping a public journal but I've done it successfully before. Anyway, in this post I'm going to revisit two ideas that I had much much earlier in the year. First I want to link to rboretum/pageback/30444/"Mr. Wilson's Arboretum - a journal that makes me want to write when I read it. The updates in this journal coincided (it ended in 2004) with national holidays and other cyclical events. The author analyzed holidays ( the writ..."

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