Hair-stylists and dentists are notorious for engaging you with random and occasionally baffling conversation topics. It’s hard to blame them – in what other scenario does a stranger sit there making physical contact with your body for significant lengths of time? It seems like you should at least be genial. (Massages don’t count, there’s an emphasis on being quiet and relaxed). I took advantage of the holiday to get my hair cut this morning, and I considered preemptively engaging the cute Spanish girl named Fernanda who was wielding the scissors in conversation about her name, and the fact that it was Columbus Day, and that she was directly or indirectly named for the monarch who chose to finance Columbus’s fateful voyage across the Ocean Blue. I didn’t though. People tend to zone out when you bring up arcane historical miscellanea, and I needed her on her game to make sure I ended up with even sideburns. I recognize that opening with this anecdote is, thus, ironic.

Columbus Day is a tough call. Once unthinkingly accepted as an excuse to have a holiday, it has become fashionable to reject Columbus as a megalomaniacal génocidaire and use this day to champion Native American rights or similar causes. Champions of indigenous peoples Rage Against the Machine call attention to Columbus’ bad reputation in their song “Sleep Now in the Fire”:

I am the Nina The Pinta The Santa Maria
The noose and the rapist
The fields overseer
The agents of orange
The priests of Hiroshima
The cost of my desire
Sleep now in the fire

This is all fair enough. Columbus was a straight-up asshole at best; he treated the indigenous people of the various Caribbean islands he terrorized discovered like small children when he was having a good day and like animals when he was having a bad day. His landing in the New World, while historically momentous to be sure, had the immediate effect of essentially wiping out the existing population of Hispaniola and other islands, partly through intentional slaughter and partly through unintentional transmission of epidemics. It’s probably not on to applaud the historical Columbus (who took the name Christopher because it literally means “Christ-bearer” in Greek and this is how he characterized himself to his contemporaries, as a missionary), except in the sense that he was a driven guy who recognized a solid investment when he saw it.

Walter Russell Mead makes a good point in this blog post, that the story of Columbus Day as a holiday has more to do with the rise of Italian immigrants (with their newly-minted fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus) taking their place along the Irish as an integrated part of American society. It was the Knights who successfully lobbied Congress to make it a national holiday in 1937.

Another historical perspective that is appropriate is to remember that while Columbus himself was Genoese, he was funded by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. This fact encapsulates several historical trends: F&I pioneering an early-modern model of state building by aggressively funding overseas exploration and later resource-extraction (paving the way for a near-century of Spanish dominance), the decline of Genoa and the Italian merchant city-states vis-a-vis continental Europe but also the Ottoman Empire (it was the Ottomans whose expansion blocked the Italians’ traditional trade networks eastward into Asia in the 16th century), and the advent of trans-Atlantic, soon-to-be triangular trade. Columbus’ landing is worth remembering for these reasons.

Vikings are Cooler

Personally, I prefer to celebrate Leif Eriksson on this day. If you care about such things as the first whitefolks to visit the New World, then you should check out Leif, who arrived in present-day Newfoundland around 1004 AD, only a half millennium before Columbus. Of course, we’d probably talk much more about Leif and his fellow Norsemen if their colony in Vinland had actually survived, but for various reasons (including hostility from the not-so-prostrate indigenous people) he and his folks returned to Iceland after a few seasons of hacking at seals and trying to use bulls as war-animals against the natives (seriously).

I leave you with a relevant sampling of heavy metal, Saxon’s “Sailing to America,” which is actually about later English colonization.