We’re coming up on Columbus Day, a holiday that seemed old-fashioned and quaint until recently. I remember it in New York as a day for politicians whose names ended in vowels to march from one cannoli shop to another. Now it has taken on new importance. That’s because it’s the latest entrée on the menu of a left starved of meaning, which is eating everything in sight. (If only they’d stick to cannolis.)

The left specializes in grand, sweeping, emotive gestures. Ones that briefly set agnostics’ parched frontal cortexes on fire. Soon they’re coursing with neural activity that simulates redemptive action. These featherless bipeds might spend most of their lives quietly accepting the desperate premise that human life is a meaningless side-effect of evolutionary randomness. Just slag cast off by a vast, dead machine: The universe.

The Fetish of the “Fearless Girl”

But give these bipeds the chance, and they’ll stage a Great Awakening of sorts. Then once they’re all “woke,” and they’ve done their share of bullying and boasting, they revert to sleepwalking through life. At least till the next chance to virtue signal comes along. Witness the frenzy, noted well in Commentary by Noah Rothman, over the “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street. Remember how that little bronze “feminist icon” bravely faced down the raging “Bull” on Wall Street? How many giddy feminists of every sex preened alongside it for selfies? How proud they seemed of themselves? Note how the company that put up the statue anointed itself with virtue juice. It had “taken a stand” for women.

Except that the story fell apart like a scarecrow if you poked it. As Rothman documents, that very company was in the late stages of a massive sex discrimination suit whose plaintiffs were … guess who? Women. So the “Fearless Girl” was simply a brilliant piece of pre-emptive damage control. Like sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein’s fundraisers for Planned Parenthood.

But what does that matter? The Facebook accounts of thousands of socialist-leaning Democrats with fat 401k savings are stuffed with happy photos. Political participation trophies. They’re memories they can treasure of “sticking it to the man,” over $7 cups of coffee whose beans, they feel sure, are “sustainable.”

Modern attacks on Columbus are often fueled by the work of radical activist professors who seek to warp history.

Don’t ask too many questions of these quaint primitives. It’s just not fair. It’s like yanking the beard off Santa Claus at the shopping mall, to horrify all the children.

The Truth About Columbus

Likewise, it almost seems cruel to resist these people’s big plans for Columbus Day. They have raised up their hopes so high. As PJ Media reports:

Violent left-wing anarchists have announced a nationwide campaign to deface Christopher Columbus statues this coming Monday.

Five Christopher Columbus statues have already been vandalized in New York City in recent weeks, according to Far Left Watch. In one case last month, vandals defaced a “larger-than-life” statue of Columbus in Central Park, leaving blood-red paint on his hands, and scrawled, “Hate will not be tolerated” and “#SomethingsComing” on its pedestal.

What is coming appears to be a coordinated campaign to destroy monuments all across the country on Columbus Day.

Is it fair to spoil their fun by pointing out some inconvenient facts? Do we really want to deprive these poor souls, bereft of genuine purpose in their lives, of a brief frisson of meaning? Aren’t we just knocking down little children’s snowmen? (My beagle, Susie, used to do that all through Highland Park.) I feel we might be doing that if we pointed out any of the following. (Thanks to the lively website TruthAboutColumbus):

• Columbus has been outrageously slandered and falsely accused of the crimes of others. The record shows he actually sought to treat the natives with respect and restrain mistreatment against them.
• Opposition to Columbus is not a recent development. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan mounted a bigoted campaign against the explorer because he was Catholic, Italian and sailed under the Spanish flag.
• Modern attacks on Columbus are often fueled by the work of radical activist professors who seek to warp history with a predetermined political agenda.
• Contemporary attacks on Columbus are sometimes unknowingly influenced by anti-Spanish propaganda known as the “La Leyenda Negra,” which originated in the 16th-century during English and Dutch conflict with Spain and portrayed the Spanish as brutal and untrustworthy.

Here’s a fun and informative video from the site:
 
 

A Time for Triggering

You know what would be even meaner than pointing out facts like these? What would amount to running up to a bunch of adult crybabies and stealing their binkies? Asking one of them the following harsh, unfeeling questions:

• Do you repent of the European settlement of North America?
• If so, are you more than 51 percent Native American?
• If not, when are you planning to hand your house over to the tribe that once resided on the land it sits on, and return to your ancestral home?
• Do you regret the introduction of Christianity to the Americas?
• If so, would you like to explain that to the hundreds of millions of Christians in Latin America, mostly of Indian descent? If we restored that Aztec human sacrifice custom, will you volunteer as a victim? We still have Montezuma’s recipe for human thigh, in chipotle sauce. (Available soon at your nearest … Chipotle!)
• Do you favor returning every country that was once conquered and resettled by invaders to the original inhabitants?
• So you agree that Israel was right to fight off the Arabs and regain its ancient homeland? That the whole Middle East should be given back to the Assyrians, Yezidis, Copts, Greeks, and Armenian Christians who once inhabited it? You know, before all those Arab conquests?
• I assume that you also support the efforts of Europeans to stop their current colonization by Muslim Arabs with no claim on that land. Right?

Asking questions like these would be totally unpastoral. It isn’t winsome. It could trigger Ivy League students and send them running for their safe spaces, to curl up in fetal balls full of coloring books and Ovaltine.

Hey, Columbus Day might be more fun than I ever suspected. Pass the cannolis.