MONUMENT CONTROVERSY DEPT.

https://news.yahoo.com/christopher-columbus-statue-taken-down-090216918.html

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” 1811

As with the once-inspiring, suddenly-inflammatory statues of Fr. Junipero Serra in California, the Grant Park monument was initially put up as a gesture of the pride Chicago felt for its Italian-Americans, and a gesture of the pride Italian-Americans felt for their Chicago. Many such statues were put up all around the nation in the wake of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which was of course in Chicago’s famous White City. The Fair was a year late and many dollars short, but the civic moment in 1893 was Progressive; the civic mood was famously “Gay,” in its Victorian sense, tolerant. The ethnic mix of immigrant America was being urged to coalesce itself into the mainstream, via the New Public Education that gave ethnicity its due, for the first time in America. Italian-Americans were honored for “discovering America.” Teaching America’s civic religion — our common myths and legends – was imperative, but it was damnably selective for what we would call “white privilege.”

Thus communities chose acceptable heroes, those whom everybody could agree represented something to the nation. Bismarck (!) and Beethoven were promoted by Germans. Count Casimir Pulaski — recently revealed to have been fabulously trans! — was a Polish-American entry. The French put Lafayette all over.

Columbus was promoted heavily with the allegorical attributes of “Enterprise.” In the erection of a statue of Columbus, usually themes of predation, colonialism, or the cultural spread of Spanish laws, customs and religion — especially Catholicism — to the New World were often downplayed. Instead, it was the character of Columbus, his individualism, his matrism (Santa Maria, Isabella) his cleverness, his leadership of men, that swelled the hearts of individual immigrant Italian-Americans. They felt that on some level, they exactly shared his story: “In Italy, I was uno povero nessuno — a poor nobody. Then I get on a big boat, discover America, and badda bing, I becoma rich!”

You could have knocked the Knights of Columbus over with a feather if you told them their hero was responsible for racism, slavery, syphillis, white supremacy, imperialism, the global spread of invasive plants, or the Spanish Armada; or that conjoining the globe was a Pandora’s box for exploitation. Actually, they would have knocked you down for traducing their compare, and you wouldn’t have gotten up.

Monument removal shouldn’t be whimsical — but it’s easier if the monuments themselves have become objects of whimsy, or display obvious mistruth, obsolete moral instruction, or whitewashing. Apart from proud Italian-Americans, few ever took the Columbus idols in a thousand American squares seriously as history or civic memory. American pop culture has saturated Columbus so thoroughly with satire, vaudeville, advertising logos, cartoons, jokes, even the Cole Porter punch lines above, that his myth can be said to have been safely de-bunked for decades. Some of these critiques even amount to a racist calumny of Italians, or its opposite, insisting Italian-Americans themselves are foolish for applauding their hero. This is not to deny legitimate anger over 500 years of European conquest of the Americas; instead, to suggest that the facts of European colonialism are more open now than ever before for discovery and interpretation by il mondo intero.

Here are two absolutely offensive and prejudiced Columbus songs. Each fully deserves six or seven closely-argued paragraphs of humorless undergraduate anti-imperialist rage. Someone will get to work on those, I’m sure. Meanwhile enjoy cultural appropriation what IS cultural appropriation. First the Buffalo Bills’ in a RARE live recording of Lou Monte’s harmless “Please, Mr. Columbus.”

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19pSMoo7JjKVKBRqG6nH5uRuagtZ94zmN/view?usp=sharing

Then the incomparable Fats Waller, and his lyricst, Andy Razaf, clear the decks for Dinah Washington to bump out her groovy history lesson.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZLPiLeSFwDXR_xvfB9-hytOOSrs2wK8L/view?usp=sharing

Consider Razaf’s bio: no nessuno, he was born in Washington, D.C. of genuine African, and figurative Afro-American, royalty. He went off to Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood, and he wrote brilliant lyrics to standards everybody knows, like”Honeysuckle Rose” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Eventually this Madagascar prince died with the Blest in North Hollywood, and is buried in the eternal sunshine of Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery. Wise Old Christopher Columbus.

“Razaf was born in Washington, D.C. His birth name was Andriamanantena Paul Razafinkarefo. He was the son of Henri Razafinkarefo, nephew of Queen Ranavalona III of Imerina kingdom in Madagascar, and Jennie (Waller) Razafinkarefo, the daughter of John L. Waller, the first African American consul to Imerina. The French invasion of Madagascar left his father dead, and forced his pregnant 15-year-old mother to escape to the United States, where he was born in 1895.^[1]
He was raised in Harlem, Manhattan, and at the age of 16 he quit school and took a job as an elevator operator at a Tin Pan Alley office building. A year later he penned his first song text, embarking on his career as a lyricist. During this time he would spend many nights in the Greyhound Lines bus station in Times Square and would pick up his mail at the Gaiety Theatre office building which was considered the black Tin Pan Alley.
Some of Razaf’s early poems were published in 1917–18 in the Hubert Harrison-edited Voice, the first newspaper of the “New Negro Movement“. Razaf collaborated with composers Eubie Blake, Don Redman, James P. Johnson, Harry Brooks, and Fats Waller. Among the best-known Razaf-Waller collaborations are “Ain’t Misbehavin’“, “Honeysuckle Rose“, “The Joint Is Jumpin'”, “Willow Tree”, “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” and “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue“. His music was played by other Tin Pan Alley musicians, as well as Benny Goodman, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway and many others. He was a contributor and editor of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League‘s Negro World newspaper.
He also wrote quite a number of raunchy ‘character’ blues-type songs for many of the women blues singers of the 1920s. He also made a number of records as vocalist (both as solo and as vocalist for jazz groups, including a handful by James P. Johnson and Fletcher Henderson). In 1972, Razaf was recognized by his Tin Pan Alley peers in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Razaf died in North Hollywood, California from cancer, aged 77.”