Why are we here? By "here" I mean celebrating this day. A number of years ago, I was hired to tour high schools with a theatrical production. One of the tour dates was Columbus Day, which that year also happened to be Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for the Jewish people. Being Jewish, I could not work that day, and since it was Columbus Day and we performed for schools I thought it might be a mistake. It wasn't, and I ended up not doing the tour. It is federal holiday, and my question is, "Why?"
Columbus did not discover America. Never mind the people that were already living here. I have a friend of Chinese descent who used to tell a joke about when he learned in school that Marco Polo discovered China. He thought this was a good thing because before that, "We were all walking around going, 'Where are we?'" The Vikings actually set foot on the continent of North America, and evidence is strong that St. Brendan of Ireland did so in the 9th century.
I used to believe that Columbus proved the world was round by sailing across the Atlantic in hopes of reaching India. I was writing a musical that had him falling off the edge of the world at the end of act 1. As Robert Wuhl points out in his "Assume the Position" specials for HBO, Aristotle proved the world was round, and in 1492 they invented the globe. It turns out that the reason we engage in this fiction about Columbus because of Washington Irving, the man who gave us Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Knicks. Okay, he did not actually give us the Knicks, but he created the notion that the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam were called "Knickerbockers."
In New York, Columbus Day is treated like an Italian Pride day. We do not need this. We have the Feast of San Gennaro which clogs Chinatown (formerly Little Italy) for 2 weeks every September. I was watching one of the extraneous history related channels on cable this morning, and they presented a rather compelling case that the Christopher Columbus that discovered the Dominican Republic was not from Genoa, but from the Catalonian region of Spain.
Native Americans, and the irony kills me that I am a native New Yorker but not a native American, do not consider this day as something to be celebrated. I can see their point. His voyage ushered in the age of European conquest of the Americas and the oppression of the native people. It also is not lost on me that Bob Costas elevated the controversy of the name of the football team in Washington (Redskins) to prime time on the eve of this day.
So, to recap, we are celebrating an Italian who was likely from Spain for discovering America and proving the world was round neither of which he did. We need a new name for that circle.