Seeya, Columbus Day. Wouldn't Wanna Be Ya.
Aaaand good riddance, Columbus Day. Don’t let the “about freaking time” hit you on the way out.
New York City public schools, as you may have recently heard, took the long-overdue step of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Naturally, some folks (mostly Italian-Americans and their sundry organizations) aren’t happy.
The question I pose to my fellow Italian-Americans, however, is as follows:
Why?
Like, why?
Why do you give a zeppole-induced crap about Christopher Columbus?
And why were you ever even a thing in the first place, Columbus Day? (Oh, right. Washington Irving. Thanks a lot, Wash!)
Really though, of all the humans in human history to get a day of their own, this paradigm of accident, this vector of syphilis, gets picked?
It should be Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It should be Indigestive People’s Day. It should be anyone’s day except for one Christopher Columbus.
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Are we Italians so insecure about our legacy we have to champion this misattributed man, year after year? Look at the amazing things Italians are recognized for already: food, culture, fashion, art, music, Bobby Cannavale. Italians are responsible for, like, 42% of western civilization. But we’re somehow obsessed with celebrating this one guy who took the long way? When has that ever been rewarded in life? And he wasn’t even close to the first European in the Americas. Not by hundreds of years. Dark Age Scandinavians tripping on mushrooms beat him to it. So the thing that he’s celebrated for, he didn’t even do.
It’s like if someone walked up right now and gave me a Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “I didn’t earn this.”
“It’s okay, you’re Italian.”
Plus, he didn’t do what he did on behalf of either Italians or Americans. He did it for Spain. Spain made him do it. Anyone heard of The Spanish Inquisition? Conquistadors? Franco? If Spain is making you do something, it’s not coming from a good place.
Taking the second Monday of October away from Columbus and dedicating it to Native Americans is the absolute least we can do.
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And Native Americans shouldn’t just get some nominal holiday either. They should get a day where every indigenous person – man, woman, and child – lines up to kick an effigy of Columbus directly in the groin. There can be dance, there can be song. There can be food and drink and merriment. All while they arrange in a queue and take their turns nailing symbolic Cristoforo Colombo in the nethers. And they can have a little speaker in its mouth area like they do with talking toys, and every time it gets smashed in the groin, it says in a stupid, wimpy little voice, “Ow, my tiny wee-wee! Oucheeeee!”
Yeah.
Are these effigial dirty-shots a poor consolation for the many wrongs done to Native Americans as a result of Columbus’s misadventures? Absolutely. But would it feel kinda good anyway? Probably absolutely.
In short, Italian-American brothers and sisters: move on from this clown Columbus already. Keep him deep in the past with the countless other over-aggrandized opportunists of history.
And let’s talk about a day for whoever invented calzones instead.
(It’d be awesome if it was a guy named Johnny Calzone. Please universe, make that be true.)
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