The case for keeping Chris on a pedestal
A Beastie Boy, Biggie Smalls and John Lennon could all be scrubbed from the city’s streets if political correctness is allowed to rule the day
CHRISTOPHER Columbus has been coming under fire for decades, and lately Mayor de Blasio hasn’t ruled out scrapping the iconic 1892 statue of the explorer, in Columbus Circle, as a possible “symbol of hate.” But if Columbus were to come back to today, he would be dumbfounded by both the acclaim and condemnation he’s received over time in a land he never knew existed.
Despite everything, Columbus has a claim to greatness. He was a peerless and fearless navigator, maybe the best ever, able to read the seas and skies with near-perfect understanding, and to make the first documented ocean voyages from Europe to the new world and back. This was at a time when sailing uncross the uncharted Atlantic was like going to the moon, only more dangerous. It took an incredible amount of courage to sail over the horizon on a quest from which no one else had ever been known to return, and to endure unimaginable hardships along the way.
All earlier efforts to sail to the Indies, as Columbus called his goal, had failed, yet he managed to accomplish this feat not once, but four times, with a minimum loss of life. Along theway he discovered the power-werful yet steady trade winds thatthat proved immensely helpful to him and later explorers.
Furthermore, Columbus was a man of deep faith. His name meant “Christ bearer,” andd he took his mission to bringing Christianity to other parts of the world with the utmost seriousness, to the point of believing he heard God talk-lking to him. For many people, that’s enough to justify his place in the annals of exploration, even if he never did anything else. But he did.
His voyages permanently changed the course of history. Thanks to them, Europe and the Americas werere subsequently linked forever through a phenomenon described by Alfred W. Crosby in 1972, known as the Columbian Exchange. This was a vast transfer in both directions between the two continents. Potatoes, tomatoes, and maize all became transplanted from the Americas to Europe, transforming agriculture and cuisine. There was no tomato sauce in Italian cooking, and no chocolate in Switzerland be-before the Columbian Exchange.nge.
Going the other way, horses, donkeys, pigs, cattle, cats, and dogs spread from Europe too the Americas, transforming economies there. All this waswas thanks to Columbus.
But his voyages also transferred Bubonic plague, chicken pox, measles, yellow fever, anand other deadly scourges that decimated indigenous peoples. Tobacco, which Columbus had observed the inhabitants of the islands he visited smoking, moved back and forth, creating health hazards everywhere. Most pernicious of all, the New World became a source of slaves for Europe. It is true that he had no idea the Pacific Ocean existed, but neither did anyone else in Europe until 1513, when Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the Pacific. Columbus was equally blivious to North America. He mmight have glimpsed the distant Florida Keys from the deck ofo his ship, but he never suspected that a giant continent llay to the north. All the streets, cities, rivers, and other landmarks named for him in North America exist in places he never imagined. Nor did he set out to “discover” a new world; he attempted to sail to the old world, Asia, where he expected to find remnants of the long-vanish vanished Mongol empire, as Marco Polo had two centuries earlier. Columbus even brought an interpreter along with him, just in case. He made other errors: he thought at times that he wawas sailing uphill, and that he’d discovered the entrance to Paradise somewhere north of what is now Venezuela. By then, his health was failing, his corneas burned out from staring at the sun, and when he climbed the rigging during a particularly violent storm, he thought he heard the voice of God speaking to him.
He accidentally triggered the suicides of tens of thousands of people who thought that he and his men (who’d begun to pair off with the women they’d discovered) were fulfilling a prophecy of doom. Finally, he took to enslaving some of the people he found, despite his urge to convert them to Christianity. No wonder the reaction against Columbus Day, established as a federal holiday by FDR in 1937, has been gaining steam for decades, replaced by efforts across the nation to celebrate “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
It is disturbing to recognize the harsh effects of Columbus’s voyages, many of them unintentional, but it would be folly to ignore the fact that Columbus came along at the right moment to connect two worlds, even without fully understanding what he was doing.
He was a true pioneer. “To the world he gave a world,” reads the legend below his statue in Columbus Circle. It wasn’t the antiquated colonial world he had in mind, but it’s not going away — not now, not ever.
WE should be relieved that Mayor de Blasio won’t send tanks in to demolish monuments and other “symbols of hate” on city land overnight.
No! Instead, deciding which statues, plaques and names to purge won’t happen until after a 90-day review by “relevant experts and community leaders” who will “define the criteria and make recommendations,” de Blasio told The Post.
Everything’s “on the table,” de Blasio said — including the Christopher Columbus statue in Columbus Circle. The 13-foot-tall likeness atop a 60-foot pedestal is loved by Italian-Americans, ignored by millions of New Yorkers for whom a statue is a statue, and loathed by no one except terrorist-coddling Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and cadres of professional agitators.
It’s little comfort that de Blasio would have the final word on the “recommendations.” The mayor’s “social justice” bent leaves no doubt as to which “hateful” public likenesses and names his panel will be targeting: those of white European ancestry.
We may assume they won’t call for re-branding the Harlem Park or the Brownsville housing project named for Marcus Garvey — an early 20th century black-nationalist firebrand, compared with whom Malcolm X was a moderate Republican. Jamaica-born Garvey was an America-hating, convicted fraudster who championed racial segregation and the mass repatriation of black Americans to Liberia. Although he’s credited with raising consciousness about racism, his far-out views were rejected by nearly all major black leaders of his time.
Even “radical” historian W.E.B. Dubois called Garvey “without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world . . . either a lunatic or a traitor.” Former President Barack Obama declined to posthumously pardon Garvey despite a prolonged campaign by his descendants and apologists urging him to do so.
Just the guy whose spirit we want presiding over our parks and homes! We await the judgment of de Blasio’s esteemed panelists.
The mayor’s plan has already opened the door to a floodtide of grievances over ancient wrongs that need to be placed in context. An activist Jewish organization wants to banish Peter Stuyvesant’s likenesses and name from city schools, parks and streets. The Dutchman called Jews “deceitful” and “blasphemous.” Do those slurs, not exactly uncommon in the 17th century, outweigh the fact that Stuyvesant helped create New York City, often called “the greatest Jewish city in the world?”
Even with the best of intentions, the challenge of weighing an individual’s good and bad works leads to ridiculous hair-splitting. A Brooklyn Heights playground, Adam Yauch Park, is named for the Beastie Boys rocker who later decided to call himself MCA. The band’s first album was initially titled “Don’t Be a Faggot” and featured misogynist lyrics. Yauch later apologized repeatedly. But what will count more for the mayor’s sages — an artist’s early heinous words, or his more recent contrition?
In today’s super-heated “sensitivity” environment, it’s not a slippery slope, but a swift tailspin, into lunacy. Shouldn’t the Woolworth Building be renamed because it was at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where four African-American students were denied service on Feb. 1, 1960? Maybe devout Christians will demand digging up Central Park’s Strawberry Fields memorial because John Lennon once proclaimed the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”
Council member Robert Cornegy wants to name a Clinton Hill playground after slain rapper Biggie Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.) — a romanticizer of the “gangsta” culture that cost him his own life. Before he “reinvented East Coast rap,” he carried a gun and sold cocaine to neighborhood youths. He exploited violence and misogyny, reflected in songs from his first album titled “Machine Gun Fun,” “Ready to Die” and “Me and My Bitch.”
Will Cornegy now drop his campaign out of sensitivity to those harmed by drugs, sexism and guns?
It all depends on who ends up on de Blasio’s sacred panel. Perhaps he’ll tap state Assemblyman Charles Barron, who represents the 60th District in central Brooklyn. As a council member ten years ago, Barron, a former Black Panther, unsuccessfully tried to get a street named for Sonny Carson — a convicted kidnapper and self-described “anti-white” agitator who infamously led the racist and violent 1990 boycott of a Korean deli in Brooklyn.
Or maybe he’ll appoint Rev. Fred Lucas, a speaker at his Jan. 1, 2014, inaugural who termed the city of New York a “plantation.” De Blasio uttered not a word of polite disagreement while his predecessor Michael Bloomberg suffered in silence a few feet away.
Would de Blasio dare to include Mark-Viverito, who invited convicted FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera to lead the Puerto Rican Day Parade? He was instrumental in the murders and maiming of dozens of New Yorkers in the 1970s. Although de Blasio wouldn’t pose for pictures with Lopez Rivera in the parade, he marched right behind him.
The lust to cleanse the town of images or honors that might give offense would leave us a town without heroes. Clearing the decks of them plays into the hands of those who have a darker purpose than merely soothing sensitivities — repudiating the city’s humane and magnificent legacy, and ultimately the legitimacy of the United States of America itself.