The debate over American iconography between the politically correct left and the patriotically correct right leaves out an essential factor—the sheer weirdness of the New World. We in the countries of the Western Hemisphere, North and South, are living in the ruins of various ambitious projects undertaken by long-dead people, many of whom were batshit crazy.
Let’s start with Christopher Columbus. At the moment the woke left is devoted to the damnatio memoriae of the former icon of the Italian American diaspora on the grounds of his brutal enslavement of Native Americans. But atrocities like his were committed by countless other Europeans and Euro-Americans, to say nothing of Native Americans themselves in the 13,000 years before the first contact between the Old World and the New.
What makes Columbus memorable is not his all-too-common brutality but his epic confusion. Euro-American civilization began with a mistake.
Columbus went to his grave stubbornly believing that the Americas were islands near Japan and China, like Taiwan or the Philippines. Moreover, during his first voyage, in a diary note of Dec. 26, 1492, he wrote of hoping to acquire enough gold and spices in what he thought would be Southeast Asia “in such quantity that the sovereigns ... will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulchre; for thus I urged Your Highnesses to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem.”
Columbus hoped that, while obtaining goods that could be sold back in Europe to pay for an anti-Muslim crusade in the Middle East, he might have opportunities to convert some of the Asians he would encounter to Christianity: “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes, lovers and promoters of the Holy Christian Faith, and enemies of the false doctrine of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, you thought of sending me, Christóbal Colón to the said regions of India to see the said princes and the peoples and the lands, and the characteristics of the lands and of everything, and to see how their conversion to our Holy Faith might be undertaken.”
