On Columbus Day

The Modern Left Is Just Stupid So Why Are We Losing To Them?

I was one of the last “I’m not using ‘Native American’ they are ‘American Indians’ dammit” holdouts. But times change, language changes, so I’m using Native American now. Don’t bug me about this. I have my reasons I just don’t want to go into it now.

What brought this on was this (hint: you can download images in case you get blocked):

I said to myself: “Ignore it. This too shall pass.” But I didn’t. Ignoring too much is as bad as ignoring nothing.”

I restacked with my own note:

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Honestly, I was going to ignore the whole thing. In and of itself it’s not worth a seconds’ time or bother. But it gives me the opportunity to point something out that I’ve been meaning to write about: the utter degradation of the left, the sheer stupidity and uselessness of these people. The signs are all around us, they are legion, but I’ll focus on Columbus Day.

I have never celebrated it, nor will I. I don’t think it’s a commemoration essential to national culture. I don’t remember the Italian-Americans I grew up around making a big deal of it.

I do think that collapsing Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday into the meaningless “President’s Day” while giving Martin Luther King the only holiday that memorializes an individual is important. I think it sucks. Forcing Juneteenth on the country while it was distracted by Covid is greater proof of the dominant culture’s decay than throwing shade on Columbus.

But… this obsessive thumb-sucking leftoid shade-throwing means something: the modern left is not only bonkers, it’s stupid. Really stupid. Thick, dumb, and stupefyingly stupid. See above. “I learned it in my college class…” is so painfully stupid.

My teacher said so. Howard Zinn said so!

[Warning: old person saying “When I was a kid” coming up.]

When I was a kid, the left was led by intelligent people. A leftist was usually a well-read man or woman, not necessarily a college graduate (when that meant something) but educated and aware of the fundamental realities. I’m not talking about average people who were sort of on the left — I’m referring to actual Marxist leftists. They weren’t numerous but they set the tone. And they were bright. They actually challenged accepted orthodoxies.

With respect to Columbus Day, I think that a pre-1960s Marxist would have acknowledged that the the Native Americans were Stone Age savages who spent their lives doing what Stone Age savages do: warring on neighboring tribes, praying to their savage deities, hunting, gathering, and not much else.

They weren’t bad people, they were just savages. Any Marxist in 1956 would have agreed with T.R. Fehrenbach on that. And the Marxist would have agreed with Fehrenbach that this way of life was doomed. That the only reason it survived even to the 17th century, much less the 19th¹ was because of isolation. The Marxist would have agreed that the introduction of Anglo culture was a hard education that the Native Americans had to adapt to. Both would have agreed that the Native Americans could adapt to Anglo (that is, modern) culture. That they had the intellectual ability to do so. They would have both agreed that this would be a difficult, wrenching adjustment.

Something tells me that Fehrenbach would have been more sympathetic to the Native Americans about what a devastating loss this would be and how difficult the adjustment would be.

As a conservative, he could acknowledge the mixed legacy of modernity. If you’re a Marxist, who cares about the cultures that are usurped and destroyed if the payoff is to live in the broad, sunlit uplands of the socialist paradise? Marxists used to be the blindest believers in progress.

I’m not even sure what the Marxist and Fehrenbach would fundamentally disagree on. I’m positive that Fehrenbach would have given capitalist expansion its due. He would just have emphasized the cultural/spiritual aspects of Anglo civilization.

But on the basics they would have agreed: the savagery of pre-Columbian Native culture and the inevitability of its destruction.

You can nibble around the edges. Could we have been more gracious winners? I think so although from what I’ve read I can’t say exactly what that would have entailed in terms of law and practice.

And not by the way but to the point: I don’t think that the Native Americans were savages from whom we can learn nothing. I’m simply stating the argument that a functional leftist would have susbcribed to. Personally, I think our culture can learn a lot from the Native Americans — in fact, we did. Some of our early political development was modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy.

They had an intimate knowledge of their environment — which they shaped, as all human beings do — which we could learn from. Shaping an environment isn’t the same as destroying it. It wasn’t a leftist who said this. It was Hugh Bennett.

The Hopi have practiced sophisticated dry farming for millenia.²

Their crafts were gorgeous.

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There is nothing useful to be gained from indulging modern leftists and their infantilism. I won’t spend time deconstructing the sentimental slop that passes for the modern left on the Native Americans.

“I learned this in college and fuck Columbus” is not even wrong.

It’s 100% worthless.

So why are we losing to them?

Because we’re disorganized and don’t offer a competing vision that’s better. Let’s work on that. We’re the problem-solvers, aren’t we?

Well, aren’t we?

1. Ignore for the sake of brevity the fact that the Plains Indians actually regressed in development due to the introduction of the horse and the rifle by Europeans — they had all been semi-settled farmers.

2. I visited Hopiland, was profoundly impressed by their culture and wrote about them in the first volume of my book.