Columbus Day, the Washington Redskins of holidays

Seattle is the latest front in the fight to reclaim Columbus Day. The city council has renamed it Indigenous People’s Day, incensing Italy’s Ambassador to the US, and outraging local Italian-Americans leaders who promise to mobilize.

Full disclosure, I am one quarter Italian myself, so I went to an objective source, Professor Richard Kurin, undersecretary at the Smithsonian for History Art and Culture, to get the straight story.

He said yes, Columbus was a tyrant, he was brought up on charges back in Spain, actually jailed.”But whatever his shortcomings, the larger impact is that he was shortly mythologized into the making of America.”

Dr. Kurin said you have to understand that there are two different histories in play: Columbus the man was a tyrant, but Columbus the NAME has an independent significance.

He understands how European contact decimated the original Americans – in fact he sees the Ebola crisis as an eerie parallel.

“People coming from distant parts of the world bringing things which could rip through the population at home that’s what must have been happening in indigenous territory,” he said.

But what he seemed to be saying is that once a myth takes on a life of its own, it’s unfair to erase the myth because of the flaws of the man behind it.

“I think that’s true, but it doesn’t mean you’re not going to look at the flaws of the man behind it,” said Kurin.

So condemn the man if you must, but cut the name some slack.