John Cabot to the Front

For John, BLUF:  Our Senioor Senator, Ms E Warren, would like to change Columbus Day to Indiginous Peoples Dsy.  Why today?  What did Indiginoous People do to spark the uniting of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Anglosphere:  Celebrating Wrong Italian? (Columbus vs. Cabot)

From Free Republic, by James C. Bennet, 12 October 2002.

Here is the lede plus seven:

A few years ago I chanced to be in Buenos Aires on Columbus Day. It is a major holiday there, during which no business is transacted. I spent the day wandering about town enjoying the celebrations. One plaza held a Columbus Day festival in which passersby could enjoy demonstrations and samples of music, dance, crafts and foods of all the various Latin American nations, and of many of the source-nations of Argentina's immigration.

The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and the holiday celebrating his landing in the New World, are seen throughout the Spanish-speaking world as having to do primarily with the extension of Spanish-speaking, Catholic civilization to the New World and the creation, through a conflicted encounter, of a new culture. It is, to coin a phrase, the creation of the Hispanosphere that is commemorated.

Traditionally, the role played by the United States in this narrative is not one of a joint participant, but rather an antagonist. In the narrative of Hispanosphere nationalists, Latin America is Shakespeare's Ariel, the graceful and sensitive artistic spirit. The United States, or "Gringolandia" as it is sometimes called, is Caliban, the powerful but ugly monster that dominates tragic Ariel.

Columbus Day in the United States carries an entirely different set of connotations. During the 19th century, Columbus was reinvented by Washington Irving and his successors as a sort of Yankee visionary entrepreneur before his time. His specific roots in time, space, and culture as a Genoese in the service of Spanish monarchs was downplayed; what was celebrated was his seeming prescience and capacity for self-reinvention.

In fact Columbus did have some such characteristics; entrepreneurism is often a leap into the unknown, and he was neither the first nor the last to set out to seek one thing and discover another, nor to venture on the basis of mistaken calculations and assumptions. There was, it is true, a certain Enron-like quality to his mileage calculations.

Subsequently, this useful narrative was seized upon and expanded by Catholic immigrant communities eager to demonstrate that Catholicism was not inconsistent with being American. Italian immigrant groups found Columbus a particularly appealing figure; here was an Italian Catholic already elevated to heroic status by the Americans they sought to join. Columbus Day became established as an American holiday, but for reasons and with symbolism quite different from those for which it is celebrated in Latin America.

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

I like the thread in this article on the influence of Calvinist Puritans.  The idea of a sinful world and a few saved from this perdition.  This does a lot to explain the Woke Community.  The modern day witch trials are now the banning of individual sinners from social media.

The other thing I liked was the bringing up of Joohn Cabot as the true person to celebrate for the founding of English colonies on North American Shores.  I don't recall learning, in elementary school, much about John Cabot, as opposed to Christopher Columbus.  I am the poorer for it.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff