October 9 is a federal holiday.  It’s one of those federal “holidays” that hangs in a twilight zone.  The federal government will be closed.  That means most banks will close. 

But it’s a twilight zone holiday because it’s not like Independence Day, when everything really closes down, or Thanksgiving Day, when most Americans are home and observe it, or even Memorial or Veteran’s Day, when something connected to the holiday, like a parade or wreath-laying,  attracts broader public participation.  There will be sales.  Many schools will be open; those that aren’t will provide a “balanced perspective” on the Genoese perpetrator of genocide and cultural evils.

It’s one of those holidays the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 amputated from history so as to create a “long weekend.”  It’s luckier than Washington’s Birthday, which will never fall on Washington’s actual birthday because there’s no way February 22 can be the third Monday of February.  Our October Federal Holiday might fall on October 12 if October 1 is a Thursday.  Congress restored Veteran’s Day, which was a casualty of that historical amnesia, to its proper historical date  -- November 11 versus the fourth Monday of October -- in 1978.

The October Federal Holiday can’t even figure out its name.  In that respect, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, another holiday that dare not speak its name.  Federal law calls it “Columbus Day.”  Some people want to call it “Indigenous People’s Day.”  Others just want to cancel it altogether.

Columbus Day is the next victim in the revisionist campaign to cancel American history.  Columbus did not “discover” America.  He “conquered” it, bringing European invasion and pandemics to the peaceful peoples of the two continents.  Apparently, no civilizational progress of note on either of those continents in the past five centuries (including the foundation of most of the readers of this essay’s country) is to be celebrated.

Glenn Morris, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, argues: “Columbus Day is not an inconsequential holiday. It is the tip of a cultural, legal and political iceberg that continues to threaten the spiritual rights, land/natural resource rights, treaty rights and cultural rights of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.”

Pace Morris, I will not apologize for calling Columbus a “discoverer” and for establishing contact between the Old and New Continents.  That none of the “advanced civilizations” of the Americas had the curiosity, got into a birchbark canoe, and sailed to Europe is not Columbus’s fault. 

I will not apologize for the cultural export of Spain, Portugal, France, and England to these continents. One can argue those cultures brought the indigenous peoples into a broader, worldwide cultural orbit.  Why is it that Americans who are supposed to “get over” the loss of their manufacturing jobs to the Third World because of globalization are also supposed to reject the globalization begun by the Age of Discovery?

 I will especially not apologize for the permeation of Christianity on these shores.  The imagery of peaceful natives in a Rousseau-like paradise singing their equivalent of “Kumbaya” around the campfire is fictional.  Ending Aztec human sacrifices was a good thing.  The martyrdom of the North American Martyrs demonstrated that the indigenous people had many of the same sins as Europeans.  St. Junipero Serra, Pierre Jean-De Smet, Jean de Brebeuf, and Eusebio Kino contributed to the advance of indigenous peoples.  Catholicism defended the rights of native peoples against the worst of imperial exploitation.

I do not deny that there were sinful, ugly pages in the history of the Americas.  But neither will I paint the entire contact between the Americas and Europe begun when Christopher Columbus saw the Bahamas early in the morning of October 12, 1492 as mournful, evil, or to be regretted. 

No one should be under any illusion that the attack on Columbus represents a broader attack on the subsequent history of the Americas, including its Christianization.  It might even be a good thing most Americans are indifferent to history: otherwise, we’d be treated to an attack not just on Columbus but his “Islamophobic” sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella.  The Catholic monarchs had, after all, initially turned down the Genoese sailor’s proposal to go east by sailing west.  They changed their minds (and found the money) only because they happened that same year to complete the Reconquista, the defeat of 700 years of Muslim domination of the Iberian Peninsula.

The October Federal Holiday whose name is being increasingly suppressed launches a three-month series of holidays that make the skin of American liberals crawl.  Columbus Day leads is followed by Thanksgiving, another federal holiday under attack.  “Native American” groups have made less headway with Thanksgiving than Columbus Day probably because the former is better observed: American Thanksgiving holiday traditions—family travel, a common meal, sports—are deeper than the Columbus Day’s.  The construction paper cutouts of Columbus’s profile or the school plays that marked my childhood in New Jersey are long gone, replaced by a “critical” view of history, and the Columbus Day sale is just another excuse to get people to stores, often to buy stuff for an overly sexualized Halloween or even to get a “jump” on Christmas. 

While Thanksgiving suffers protests, fewer Americans pay them heed.  The liberal modus operandi for Thanksgiving is different: dinner table indigestion from partisans (usually in college) needing to correct your deplorable views with talking points on abortion, inflation, crime, and Obamacare. 

As soon as Thanksgiving goes into the rearview mirror, however, comes the 900-pound festive elephant in the room: Winter Holiday (AKA “Christmas”).  Here the Left and secularists (but I repeat myself) will do their best to deny December 25 its identity. You’ll be wished “happy holidays,” asked what you’re doing for “Winter Holiday,” maybe get invited to a “holiday party,” perhaps hear about “Winter Solstice.”  Those who are otherwise sensitive to “identity” will do their level-best to suppress the identity of Christmas through euphemism, talk-arounds, or simple ignoring of the event.  Christmas creches will not be allowed to speak their message unless Santa Claus sits atop the Bethlehem stable and Rudolph mingles with the ox and donkey.  (A new addition to the secular guilt calendar, allowing its extension into the new year, is the replacement of Epiphany or Twelfth Night -- which the churches have largely transferred off to an adjacent Sunday -- as “Insurrection Day”).

The last quarter of the year is a hard time to be an American liberal.  Maybe Hallmark can introduce a sympathy card to go on sale with the October Federal Holiday.

Image: s3k via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 (cropped).