They Doth Protest Too Much

We have little memory for weather, but Yardstick recalls that last Monday the climate was not conducive to protesting Columbus Day. It was cold. But it was also cold three years ago, when Yardstick was a first-year in Weld Hall and Columbus Day protesters chattered outside his window all night long, exchanging the kind of ideas that only emerge in the generous, delirious pall of late night. And on every single recent Columbus Day prior to last Monday, there was another sleep-over j’accuse colloquium on the steps of Widener Library.

But last Monday there was not. In the afternoon, about 15 people assembled on the Memorial Church steps for a discussion of “The Legacy of Columbus.” It was scheduled to last two hours, but could hardly muster enough energy for one. None of the speakers were particularly angry or protesty. For instance, someone who had been raised on a reservation gave a gently moving talk about what Columbus represents to him: subjugation, national forgetfulness, etc…

It is futile to dispute people’s associations of Christopher Columbus with mass murder, oppression and the appalling conditions that still exist on reservations. And maybe it doesn’t help that we have assigned Columbus a holiday, which is basically the most vague, imprecise and symbolic honor we can bestow.

However, Yardstick does protest the unfortunate fact that, because Columbus has his own holiday, he is a rich target for coarse cartooning. Yardstick also protests that it is ahistorical to view Columbus through the lens of today’s moral standards. It is the kind of work that pop historians have done for years with their Troubled Genius biographies: Kepler was a nut, Hemingway was a drunk, and don’t get us started on Rousseau.

Yardstick submits that Columbus was as brave as all the myths and rhyming couplets say he was. Columbus was a fanatical leader with a superior sense of Manifest Destiny, like Hemingway with more focus, like Kepler with a better-developed sense of history, like Rousseau with more diplomatic facility. Columbus’ lifetime achievements are monumental: He captured the faltering imagination of Western Europe. He gave to her people the only the thing that could resuscitate her failing fortunes: hope.

Fine. But Yardstick has the temerity to venture further: Columbus did not commit any acts that were immoral by the standards of his day. Of course, in 1492 there were some who thought it morally wrong to enslave the native people of Spain’s conquered lands, just as there are some who today think it is morally wrong to drive SUVs—a debate Yardstick will leave for another column. But timid and sporadic discussion does not a moral consensus make. In fact, according to the eminent social historian Anthony Pagden, the debate was a question of political expedience and not moral conviction, like the Environmental Protection Agency versus Big Oil. And anyway, the Spanish monarchs and the Pope ruled in Columbus’ favor. Perhaps Columbus Day protesters wish that Columbus had the moral character of Martin Luther King Jr., the foresight of Alexis de Tocqueville and the face of Kevin Costner. But back then, nobody did. And Columbus went on four amazing voyages of danger and adventure that gave birth to the modern age. Isn’t that enough?

This is Yardstick’s best effort at justifying his own support of Columbus against the Sunday-morning homilies of resentful anti-Columbites. But this has not answered the initial question: Why last week’s severely small turnout at Columbus Day protests?

Like virtually every other cultural critic, Yardstick can relate this question to the awful national experience of Sept. 11. Here we have an act that nearly every human on the planet finds morally repugnant. People are saying that Sept. 11 saw the Death of Irony, but Yardstick tenders that Sept. 11 also saw the Death of the Agenda. Who will be morally outraged at events that took place 500 years ago, when so many people were massacred just a month ago? Christopher Columbus may very well be a symbol of immoral behavior, but these terrorists are real and they are here and we are following vigilantly their every move, their every moral justification. They present an actual, unfathomable moral gap that cannot be satisfactorily described by means of some direct and simple analogy with our own moral environment. Yardstick hates these terrorists probably with more zeal than our collective moral outrage justifies.

In conclusion, Yardstick points out that nowadays Columbus is too much a symbol and too little an examined historical figure. Symbols are for newcomers and neophytes (for instance, babies have symbolic sight). Symbols have the effect of telling you what to think. Instead, Columbus Day should tell us what to think about. This October, we were thinking about boxcutters and anthrax and the little pocket of utter immorality in Afghanistan. This is the kind of historical bowel-loosener that makes Columbus (or logging in Alaska or animal cruelty or violence on television) seem like a pretty pathetic target for protest. Now that Sept. 11 is the official symbol of moral anachronism, Columbus Day can finally claim its rightful place in the constellation of holidays as a celebration of the adventure and accomplishment that spawned the deeply moral society we have today. For Columbus’ long weekend, the climate was finally right, not for protest, but for careful consideration.

Couper Samuelson ’02 is a history and literature and French studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.