The Politically Correct Rap On Chris Columbus

STOP the presses! Move the capital of Ohio! Christopher Columbus was not a New Age, sensitive guy!

I haven't felt this bad since I found out George Washington had slaves. Yes! The father of our country violated the civil-rights statutes right there in the bosom of Mount Vernon.

And now this - a man a lot of us had pegged as a 1492 Phil Donahue turns out to be a testosterone case. Pillage, plunder, enslavement of ethnic peoples, speciesism, plant trampling, and not one woman in a supervisory capacity on any of his boats.

So, big deal, he sailed the ocean blue and found a new world. What good is it if he wasn't able to plan ahead 500 years and take into account the enlightenment of future generations? This guy called himself a visionary, a great mind? Ha!

Villain, that's what he was. Nothing good about him at all. He was a man of his time and deserves what he gets in 1991, which is to say a politically correct rap in the mouth from people who went to much better schools than he did.

He should have known he couldn't keep up the St. Chris gig - never mind that it wasn't his idea, but was created during the War of 1812, when people here were looking for a non-British hero to celebrate. The public giveth and the public taketh away.

Of course, it would never do to simply accept Columbus as a full warts-and-all-type human being who did some good and some bad. That would prevent a lot of people from getting on talk shows and selling

books debunking the man who was never really there.

One must have controversy in the U.S. of A. One must polarize into factions - the pro-Columbus side and the anti-Columbus side. One must see history as a lump of Silly Putty to be punched around to suit our current political agendas, rather than a continuum from which we learn and grow.

How boring if we put all the players on the table - Leif Ericsson, St. Brendan, Columbus, the people who were here before any of them - and just talked about what happened. A lot of what happened was disgusting. A lot of it was wonderful. All of it changed the world.

But the passion of the day is to rewrite history, not merely to study it. We have to blame, get on bandwagons, demand, and otherwise make a lot of noise looking backward.

One can't help wondering, in a weak moment when one is taking a breather from being outraged over Columbus, what would happen if we invested the same amount of energy into looking forward.

If one said, for instance, "That was then, and this is now," could we digest things more easily? If we said, "We're not celebrating the subjugation of a people but acknowledging one man's voyage, which was pretty gutsy, despite what he did after he landed," could we still live with ourselves taking next Monday off?

Let's not forget that if Chris hadn't busted his way into the pristine land with all the delicacy of bulldozer, somebody else would have. Domination was big in 1492. People hadn't learned to vent their hostilities in group therapy yet.

We're talking prime real estate here, and the Donald Trumps of the day knew a good thing when they saw it. Or a bad thing, as the case may be.

Human nature is not nice, especially when it has a fistful of power. Today it's nicer than it used to be in some quarters, but society is hardly ready to accept the Mother Teresa Award.

How will history judge us 500 years down the road? Could be we'll be remembered as the numb-numbs who shopped all the time and blew a hole in the ozone.

"They kept building malls while people starved in the streets!" future pickets might shout, demanding the closing of an exhibit on discoveries of the 20th century. "What good is an artificial heart if we all have to live underground?"

Or maybe the minds of 2491 will be more tolerant of ignorance and less arrogant about progress. "You do what you can with what you've got," they might say, if we're lucky, and if we haven't destroyed the whole shebang trying to show the other guy how smart we are.

Susan Trausch is a Boston Globe columnist.