Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

My last statements on this matter.

If a mural hanging in an institution of higher learning depicts imagery that is at variance with the scholarship that many of those who pass by it possess, and which offends many people based upon that scholarship, and if those same people perhaps also possess an ethnic heritage that informs their reactions, then taking over 25 years to discuss *covering it up is more than reasonable.

*Uncovering it when it is time for the history class on 'The Misrepresentation of Historical Figures and Events in Art and Literature', to visit.

And it’s not political correctness to refuse to indulge willful ignorance and benighted beliefs created in children who insist in carrying grammar school level hagiography into supposed adulthood.

It's just, correct.


This Columbus Day, a reminder that Christopher Columbus was “a murderous moron”

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/10/9/16447180/christopher-columbus-day-adam-ruins-everything

Adam Ruins Everything explains that the popular myth of Christopher Columbus gets a lot wrong.

By German Lopez@germanrlopez [e-mail] Updated Oct 8, 2018, 9:15am EDT

Columbus landed on what he thought was Asia but was in fact some Caribbean islands. He’s often given credit for discovering these islands, but, as Conover pointed out, they were already occupied. This is key to Columbus’s story, because what follows was truly awful.

After the indigenous Taino people on the island of Hispaniola were hospitable to Columbus, he “repaid their kindness by returning with 17 ships and 1,200 men so he could enslave the Taino and steal their gold,” Conover said. “There was only one problem: They didn’t have any.”

A slaughter followed, reducing the native population from the hundreds of thousands to the hundreds. (Much more on all of this in Vox’s Dylan Matthews’s great explainer on Columbus’s tyranny.)

This is what Columbus would do for the rest of his days: sail around the Caribbean, murdering indigenous people. He died thinking that he had been doing all of this in India, never realizing he had set foot on lands that European navigators didn’t know existed at the time.

Over the next few hundred years, Columbus wasn’t well known until Washington Irving, who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, authored the first major English biography of Columbus in 1828.

The positive story of Columbus — how he proved the Earth was round and discovered America — was embraced by Italian immigrants to America, who were in search of an American hero as they faced discrimination and persecution in the US.

“To help prove that Italians were a part of the American story, Italian Americans latched onto Irving’s version of Columbus, and promoted it like crazy,” Conover said. “And that’s the true story of how an incompetent and vicious nobody became the national hero we celebrate today.”

Of course, not everyone celebrates Columbus. This Columbus Day, many people are pushing for another holiday — Indigenous Peoples’ Day — to honor the victims of Columbus’s cruelty.