Greetings, Dear Reader,
I grew up in an Italian household. My stepfather was 100%. To Italians, you’re 100% or you’re not Italian. Yonkers, New York, Long Island. Trays of baked ziti. Miles of it. Four loud women in the kitchen. Two of them are rotund. No meat without pasta. No pasta without sauce. Cheese. Chains. Crosses. Guinea tees. Hairy arms. Sweaty shirts. Mikey. Nicky. Tommy. John John. Junior. Angela. Five Maries. At least one Mary.
So you can guess two things from here: One, there will be no SOTD for Columbus Day. Don’t expect me to be inboxing you. I’ll see you on Tuesday.
And two …
COLUMBUS
Slavery in America started long before 1619.
Also slaughter, ritual sacrifice, ritual torture, massacres, wanton murder of women and children, forced assimilation, forced adoption.
I’m not a historian. It took me about ten minutes of searching scholarly work this morning to find significant primary evidence of all these among the indigenous tribes prior to European colonization. It’s in their oral tradition! They spoke about it themselves! I haven’t even read it all yet, but it’s there. Evidence of full-blown torture spanning days. Child slave trades. Even the trump card of human evil: genocide.
Yes, free of European influence, native Indian tribes attempted to wipe each other off the map.
You rarely hear about any of this because the “diversity, equity and inclusion” movement that ascended to the heights of culture over the past 20 years memory-holed it in favor of a deranged, ironically exclusionary, Howard Zinnian approach to history. But it’s still there if you want to read about it.
The introduction of European settlers rapidly intensified the intertribal competition, and right along with it, the violence. That’s another thing you don’t hear much about anymore. The way we hear it now, these people were just gathering berries when Euros racked with scurvy started dropping biological weapons and gathering the survivors as slaves.
The reality is they raced to kill each other even faster in order to ally with key European interlocutors. They saw a benefit in foreign alliance insofar as it enabled them to carry out further slaughter of their own kind for the sake of their own domestic supremacy.
There were a few other things I read about the tribes in the course of my search. They were impossible to avoid because these things were inextricably linked with all the negatives.
Nobility. Honor. Deep, even cosmological spirituality. Loyalty. Bravery. Resourcefulness. Family, community, respect for elders. Complex coming-of-age traditions. Even more complex and deeply nuanced warrior culture.
Before the wokesters polluted our history, dyed its hair pink and covered it in doodle tats, we unironically and without shame named attack helicopters Apaches. We also have a UH-1 Iroquois. We have Chinooks and Black Hawks. The USS Sioux, USS Seminole, USS Cherokee.
Some Navy SEALs have been known to still carry hatchets into combat. In the rare event Trump were to launch missiles, I can almost guarantee they’d be Tomahawks.
There’s always been a profound respect for their culture, especially in the military. We knew about the atrocities. We experienced firsthand the negatives; the exact kind that would get your statue torn down 200 years later if only you were a white man. We deliberately set those aside, not to forget, but to memorialize the native Indians.
They are, in fact, part of us.
There is no American history without them. There is no America without them, tragic and inevitable as their end might have been. And it was inevitable.
It was also for the better. I’m not even slightly sorry to say it.
Without a doubt and by the numbers, the most prolific upside for all mankind came as a result of the United States going coast to coast. The steady reduction of human misery around the world over the past two and a half centuries can be tied directly to the rise and supremacy of Washington and its ideals.
Of course we’re not without sin. Nobody is. Neither is Columbus.
The absolute balls hanging off that man. Back when sailing the Atlantic was basically a death sentence on top of an unconscionable abyss. It’s been 500 years; we have satellites, rockets, GPS in our pockets, nuclear submarines, and we still lose things in the ocean. Columbus got on a glorified raft with a bunch of maniacs and decided to shoot the moon, and we’re all the better for it.
We don’t remember him for his sins and character flaws — and he had many — we remember him for his bravery, resourcefulness, vision, spirit and determination.
Little kids learning little poems about him is not some effort to whitewash history, as the pink hairs would have you believe. Just like little kids dressing up as Indians and Pilgrims for Thanksgiving isn’t some vile attempt to brainwash. It’s just little kids learning the basic positives of history.
Why shouldn’t children learn that different cultures can sit down and eat peacefully? Because it offends your perpetually and professionally aggrieved spirit? Go sit in time out.
If you want blood and guts, take out loans for grad school.
History is a beautiful mess, and Columbus is a key part of it. It’s hard to imagine a more central pivot point in the history of Western civilization than Columbus setting sail across the Atlantic.
It undeniably set in motion the conditions that gave rise to the founding of America — as I’ve said, the most consequential contribution of which was a staggering and historic global decline of human suffering.
Like pioneers after him, from the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, he truly believed he was chosen for greatness. And like all those men, that belief bordered on delusion. And like them, ultimately, it wasn’t delusion. It was reality.
Pocket supercomputers have changed humanity. So have cheap rockets. Short of the actual Bible, I don’t think a more consequential document than the Declaration of Independence has ever been written.
None of it possible without Columbus.
So when Monday comes around, don’t feel the need to genuflect to anything other than his bravery and vision.
WHAT I’M READING
What a joke.
Hakeem Jeffries Goes Full NPC When Confronted By Mike Lawler
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Scarf down this beautiful tray of baked ziti from Nat Sandoval.
Attorney Explains Free Speech To Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
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It’s always the money.
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It’s about time we put down America’s lamest rebellion.
Portland Anarchists Openly Plot Mass Attack On Federal Aircraft
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