Sicilian Culture: News: Postive News on Columbus

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Positive News Articles on Christopher Columbus
1) NATION NOT IN THE MOOD FOR COLUMBUS DAY DUST UP- Washington Times
2) A POST CARD FROM COLUMBUS-NY Times
3) REDISCOVERING COLUMBUS DAY-Free Republic
4) (The Case Against) THE CRIMES OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS First Things
5) ON COLUMBUS DAY, CELEBRATE WESTERN CIVILIZATION, NOT MULTICULTURALISM-Ayn Rand Institute

Nation Not in the Mood for Columbus Day Dust Up
Tom Knott, The Washington Times
October 4, 2001 - - Richard Regan, the most sensitive Lumbee Cheraw Indian in America, is wiping the tears from his eyes again, trying to stay strong as the annual acknowledgement of Christopher Columbus nears.
Mr. Regan voices no objection to Columbus Day sales, held each year on Oct.12 - just to Columbus, a dead white guy who is not dead enough. Columbus, of course, is the guy who took a wrong turn in 1492 and landed in the Bahamas, whereupon he ordered one of those fancy drinks that comes with a tiny umbrella. This was the so-called New World, although it really wasn't new to the tour-guide operators and T- shirt hawkers already there.
Mr. Regan and the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs are advocating the elimination of the Columbus Day holiday, mostly because the dead white guy still hurts their feelings 509 years after the fact. That is a powerful hurt.
Mr. Regan, in particular, has been feeling a considerable amount of hurt in recent months, finding a never-ending supply of slights in his tiny part of the world, notably with the make-believe Indians at Poolesville High School.
The Indians there are down to their last eight months because of Mr. Regan's hyperactive tear ducts. He cried in Poolesville. He cried in Germantown. He is crying in front ofColumbus Day, the 30 percent off on jeans be darned.
With Mr. Regan, a rain dance is redundant. He merely floods the terrain with his tears.
Give Mr. Regan credit. He is not just a little self-absorbed, a little lost, a little out of touch with the nation's flag-waving mood following the horrific attacks of Sept. 11. He is way out there, seemingly oblivious to the staggering events around him.
Most of America is putting aside its petty differences, dropping its pre-Sept. 11 pretenses, defining anew what it means to be an unhyphenated American while immersing itself in the details of this strange, new war against a sick, shadowy enemy.
Mr. Regan is one exception, the anti-war misfits another. Just say no to Columbus Day. Just give peace a chance. Each message, however disparate, comes from the same tank of impudence. This being the great land that it is, Mr. Regan has the fundamental right to express the inanities of his itty-bitty cause, incongruent though the cause is in the context of America being at war to preserve those rights.
Others have the right to note the increased sense of responsibility that goes with the right. It should not be spent on divisive blather amid the prospect of American troops returning home in body bags.
Mr. Regan's latest appeal was made while Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening, among other officials, was making a highly publicized trip to New York City, the purpose of which was to demonstrate that air travel is safe again.
Not surprisingly, the governor and his people are not paying attention to Mr. Regan and the resolution passed by the Indian commission to abolish Columbus Day. The resolution was a nonstarter before ink was put to it.
The juxtaposition is jarring.
Mr. Regan and the Indian commission are worried about a dead white guy's holiday, while the state of Maryland and the rest of the nation are worried about another terrorist attack.
All kinds of admonishments come to mind: Get your priorities straight. Have some perspective. Take a chill pill. Try drinking decaf.
One other thing: Next Friday, do your patriotic part to help the economy. Find some Columbus Day holiday sales and shop until you drop.

Greetings From the New World:
A POST CARD FROM COLUMBUS
By Margo Nash, The New York Times
October 7, 2001 - - During his voyage in 1492, Columbus wrote a letter to Raphael Sanchez, King Ferdinand's treasurer, announcing he had found new lands in the western ocean. The letter was published as a book in 1493 and other editions followed.
The title of the document known as The Columbus Letter was: ''A Letter of Christopher Columbus to Whom Our Age is Much Indebted About the Recently Discovered Islands of India Beyond the Ganges in Search of Which He Had Spent Eight Months Before Under the Auspices and the Expense of the Most Invincible Ferdinand, King of the Spains.'' The Firestone Library at Princeton University has three copies.
Stephen Ferguson, curator of rare books at Firestone Library, talked about them.
Q. What does the edition from 1494 look like?
A. It is 15 pages long. It was published in Basel and was the first illustrated Columbus letter. Because it is rag paper -- they pulped cloth to make the paper -- it's in remarkably good condition. The paper is very fresh, very white, and the ink is very black against the pages.
A picture on the opening page shows two Europeans arriving in a rowboat at a shore in the middle distance. At the top it says ''Insula Hyspana,'' the Spanish Island. It shows the inhabitants of the island, none of whom are wearing clothes, and in the foreground is a European sailing ship complete with sails and oars.
Another picture is a kind of a pictographic map. It shows different islands labeled Hispana, Isabella, Concepcion, Salvatore, Fernanda, names referring to the Spanish crown or to religion. Columbus, in another part of the letter, says that part of the coastline is in Cathay or China. This is the first printed account of America. It is automatically first on any list of American books and is an early example of how the art of printing spread news.
Q. What does Columbus report?
A. He writes, ''I saw no monsters neither did I hear accounts of any except in an island called Charis, the second as one crosses over from Spain to India, which is inhabited by a certain race regarded by the neighbors as very ferocious. They eat human flesh and make use of several kinds of boats by which they cross over to all the Indian islands and plunder and carry off whatever they can.'' He is holding a conversation with his readers who have read books similar to the ones he read, such as 'Sir John Manderville's Voyages' which were a kind of fabulous tale which talked about monsters at the edge of the world.
Q. How is the book stored?
A. Books that have been treasured books over the years are usually in quite fancy mainly late 19th century, early 20th century gilt and expensive leather bindings as are these letters. In a way, those bindings are part of the cultural history of this object, signal of the value and esteem with which these particular books were held. In is kept in the rare book department under controlled access, behind glass in locked cases in a room which is under surveillance. They can be used in the reading room under supervision.
Q. How did the library acquire them?
A. The three Columbus letters that we have came to us from the collection of a man named Grenville Kane, a New Yorker who at the beginning of the 20th century collected Americana, historic books about America. They came into the library when Firestone was opened in 1948 as a purchase of the university in celebration of the opening.

REDISCOVERING COLUMBUS DAY
Rediscovering Columbus Day [Free Republic]
www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3bbdeb7f7ed6.htm
Source: The American Cause: Rediscovering Columbus Day
October 5, 2001 - - Rediscovering Columbus Day A few years and an age ago, school children still lisped, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
Today, they’re taught, in the words of Robin West, author of Progressive Constitutionalism, “[T]he political history of the United States…is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexist devaluation of women, and a less than admirable attitude of submissiveness to the authority of unworthy leaders in all spheres of government and public life.”
God bless America.
Though Columbus Day is now little more than an excuse for department store sales, it’s a wonder our calendars remember it at all. Members of the National Council of Churches have voted to denounce the explorer’s arrival as an “invasion” and suggest repentance for the “genocide, slavery, ecocide and exploitation” Columbus brought ashore.
The U.N. refused to acknowledge the quincentennial anniversary, and even the Smithsonian revised its remembrance of the discovery – er, encounter – from celebration to commemoration.
Once a fixture in the hall of heroes, Columbus is now recast as a spoiler who stumbled upon the Western hemisphere in a misbegotten treasure hunt. But it wasn’t always this way.
On the tercentennial of his landing, New York’s King’s College was renamed Columbia, and our capital city was called the District of Columbia, an honor some wanted extended to the whole country.
On the 400th anniversary, President Benjamin Harrison hailed Columbus as “a pioneer of progress and enlightenment.” Irish Catholics organized the Knights of Columbus, praising the explorer as an “instrument of Divine Providence,” and the “Columbian Exhibition and World’s Fair” opened in Chicago to national applause. Forty percent of the country’s population attended.
But by the five-century mark, a seismic shift had occurred. Garry Wills observed in the New York Review of Books, “A funny thing happened on the way to the quincentennial observation of America’s Discovery …. Columbus got mugged. This time the Indians were waiting for him.
He comes now with an apologetic air – but not, for some, sufficiently apologetic …. He comes to be dishonored.” Historian Hans Koring penned a New York Times op-ed headlined, “Don’t Celebrate 1492 – Mourn It.” Jan Carew wrote in Columbus: The Rape of Paradise that he "introduced slavery to the West and set off a legacy of shame and racism that continues to this day."
What knocked the pedestal from beneath the Admiral of the Sea? Why should a figure once revered now be reviled? It wasn’t some just found foible or long lost journal. Columbus hasn’t changed. We have.
The microwave mentality of the modern age has little use for history, thus our hunger for heroes now settles on rock stars and sports celebs – the glitterati of the moment. Gossip has replaced greatness. National myth is no more. For generations weaned on multicultural mush, a European, who by their books inaugurated a racist past, is inferior to the eco-friendly, peace-loving peoples he encountered. (Fast forward past the historical evidence that they were warlike practitioners of human sacrifice and slavery.)
With pluralism enshrined as its own end, diversity strips national character of common icons. We no longer rally around a shared past because history retold, fractures us into descendants of noble victims and guilty conquerors. The revision reads like a balance sheet of grievances. “The hullabaloo over Christopher Columbus,” writes Robert Bork, “is one more manifestation of the war in the culture.” The revolutionaries secure ascendance by contrasting a shameful history with their own goodness. Thus they control the future by capturing the past, and the rootless majority makes the suicidal buy-in.
But even Columbus knew better. Late one night, after a Christmas storm destroyed the Santa Maria, he wrote in his ship’s log, “In all the world, I do not believe there is a better people or a better country.” From the earliest days, ours is a glorious memory, checkered but inspiring, and though prevailing winds beat hard against it, we must never stop trying to take back.
Happy Columbus Day.
(The Case Against) The Crimes of Christopher Columbus.
www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9511/dsouza.html
The Ayn Rand Institute- Michael S. Berliner
On Columbus Day, Celebrate Western Civilization, Not Multiculturalism
www.aynrand.org/medialink/columbus.html

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