A wake for Christopher C.

Just in time for Columbus Day, Pittsburgh shrouded its statue of the Italian explorer with tarps. This is in preparation to remove the statue from its Schenley Park pedestal. We skipped the funeral. This is a wake. The statue’s shroud is fitting — it signifies the slow death of intellectual honesty in our observance of history.

Christopher Columbus, who boldly sailed into eventual infamy and opened the floodgates in the “New World” for Western civilization in all its early gore and glory, is in fine company these days. The very same weekend Schenley Park concealed Columbus, “woke” Portland residents toppled statues of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.

Is any historic figure without sin? Is any statue of an historic figure safe?

A few self-anointed citizens have apparently decided that condemning and sacrificing others makes them somehow morally superior.

After all, if they’re better than Honest Abe, they must be examples of the nation’s social progress. If they’re able to decry Teddy Roosevelt’s glaring faults, then they’re in a better position to guide the nation’s future.

And so long as Pittsburgh’s mayor pays lip service to Columbus’ significance to the city’s Italian community, which is large, he may get a pass on deposing Columbus from Schenley Park.

But maybe not.

There is a middle ground between tearing down statues and leaving them up in all their historical veneer without comment or question. (That middle ground will not be found in the mayor’s double speak).

Exploring a nuanced understanding of these figures and their legacies with lectures, and explanatory plaques, would be one way. Building new monuments — erecting and not destroying them — would be another way.

Weighing someone’s good and bad deeds in full and presenting them side-byside is still another.

Columbus created a bridge for Western civilization. He also killed and enslaved native populations.

Can Americans not recognize and celebrate the former while acknowledging and condemning the latter? This slope ends in a cliff. Erasure and obliteration is not the answer. It is not the American way, but the totalitarian way.

The American way, the way of freedom, is to embrace and preserve history, in all its messiness and complexity.

The wake for Christopher Columbus is a temporal insult to Italian Americans. But it is also a chilling assault on history itself.