Columbus Day
Sometimes the knocking down of historical figures rings a little bit unfair. The examples of this are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and various founding fathers — amongst any number of other sins — slave-owners be they. Regardless, towering figures worthy of respect.
Christopher Columbus is the one figure that is sort of deserving of being knocked off his pedestal. The worthiness of it is that he more or less has been knocked off — the attack on Christopher Columbus has stuck, to the chagrin of those that complain and yell about “political correctness” coming out of Academia.
Yesterday I was talking with a student at PSU (Portland State University) and a student at PCC (Portland Community College). The PCC student said he had no class today; the PSU student said he did — and was surprised that the PSU student didn’t have that day off “Columbus Day, isn’t it?” My response was “Columbus Day isn’t a politically correct holiday”, which I needed to quickly come up with an explication that ended up as “Indian Killer”.
Now, I walked by PCC today and saw students lounging about, suggesting that there might have been classes there, but let’s assume they took Columbus Day off. There is a strange bit of ideological cleavage there, something that suggests why Bush in his two presidential campaigns found his way there and Gore went to PSU. I don’t know how to further explain it, except that I watched Alan Greenspan explain the “creative destruction” in the death of the manufacturing sector of the economy with “This is why Community College is the fastest growing educational sector” — the training of a workforce (another ideological cleavage; after the 1994 Republican victory, the Congress changed the word “Labor” to “Workforce”; I think after 2006 it’s been changed back) —
and it rings right on back to where Christopher Columbus Day is observed and where it is not.