Good evening:
One of the things about today's class that stuck with me was our fairly strong consensus that Columbus was crazy. The comment about how we have Columbus Day and not Cortes Day got me to thinking about other holidays or times we commemorate, without really considering the full implications of celebrating that person. Lincoln is someone who is always celebrated as a genuinely good person, with few flaws (if any). But Lincoln also simply cut all civil liberties in the border states such as Maryland, removing habeus corpus, and having "Federally-supervised" voting booths - and then the whole "Emancipation Proclamation" was an afterthought to preserving the Union. That said, he is generally regarded as one of the best US presidents - and taken in the aggregate with the benefit of hindsight, I totally agree with that prognosis. I suppose I just find it odd that I do agree with that, because there is no sort of criteria for what mix of doing bad and good (in terms of long or short term) yields a famous figure worth commemorating. In the same manner, Cortes strikes me as perpetrating much more evil (even without knowing all of the specifics), and therefore it seems to me that no holiday commemorating him makes any sense.
So to take this post in an entirely different direction, what about that elusive set of people and groups who did mostly good and then either get no recognition whatsoever, or even only negative recognition? The group that comes to mind is the Freemasons, whose philosophy is the [unprecedented] basis for much of American government and political philosophy. These crazy ideas like spreading a vote out to each member (albeit only white land-owning men at first), and the ideas of freedom of speech and religion, all emanate directly from Masonic principles. Yet, not too long after the country was founded, the Anti-Masonic political party sprang into existence. I guess that today's class got me to thinking, overall, about how the constant fickleness of people affects even our "heroes" and how we remember them - people are weird.
Hoping that you aren't insulated in some sort of fake reality
-Mike
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3 comments:
I think that the point about Lincoln in Mike's post was an interesting one. Perhaps it is because in the end, what Lincoln did turned out well, that we tend to forget the means he used to achieve it? I wonder if we do the same with Columbus. What he did, in the end, opened up the door for the U.S. to be settled by the Europeans, without which, our world would be very different. Maybe this is why we tend to forget what atrocities he committed or the fact that he was, for lack of a better word, crazy. It seems, that in this situation, the ends justify the means. Or maybe it we just tell ourselves this to make everyone feel better about what actually happened when Columbus landed here and what he actually set in motion as far as colonization is concerned.
Not going into the evil deeds of Cortes, I think we (United States) could not have a Cortes Day because he wasn't involved in "discovering" America, though Columbus didn't land on America's mainland either. Columbus interacted with the "Indians" while Cortes met with the Aztecs, who are more alien to American history. Columbus Day seems to celebrate the discovery of the New World more than the man. It just happens to be named after him (since New World Day would sound a little ridiculous). A Cortes Day also strikes me as making no sense as a holiday but for reasons not related to him conquering the Aztecs.
Point of interest from a class I had last semester: the emancipation proclamation did not actually emancipate anyone at the time it was made, because it only freed slaves in states that had seceded from the Union, and at the time the Confederate states did not acknowledge Lincoln's power to emancipate their slaves. Gotta love it.
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