The more we know about our public figures, the less we tend to like them. There are exceptions, of course, but so often the merciless microscope of history reveals deep flaws even in the most famous and admired characters from the past. In our own age, so many sports stars, businessmen, politicians, pop music performers, hellfire preachers and bestselling authors have been revealed as ordinary, tarnished human beings, and sometimes much worse, than we have become, as a society, rather cynical about high claims and high reputations, which is probably healthy.
We say how the mighty have fallen with some satisfaction — and what splendid material we are providing for future cynics. Sometimes we must wait a long time for the reckoning, but history catches up with everyone at the end.
Christopher Columbus is a perfect example, and safely distant in time. He has a lot to answer for. When he so boldly sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus, and his patron Queen Isabella, set a pattern of bad behavior for the whole western world. In different ages, this behavior has been called piracy, economic imperialism, prospecting, entrepreneurship, gambling, and corporate capitalism. But the basic motivation has always been the same passion that urged Columbus to undertake his dangerous exploits. According to one of his biographers, Columbus was a hero, no doubt, but one driven by a ‘Burning desire to acquire riches, power and fame.’
Now we have a clearer picture of Columbus and his voyages we can see what kind of predatory explorer he really was. Without his myth and a federal holiday, Columbus would vanish from the collective memory like the grin of the Cheshire cat. Some states, recognizing this, have changed the holiday into Indigenous Peoples' Day or Native American Day. History does matter.
The frustrating thing about the past is that we don’t know and may never know anything for sure. A careful look at almost any historical ‘fact’ that everybody knows to be true will show that it is a myth. The Declaration of Independence was not signed on the Fourth of July, and baseball was not invented in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Columbus didn’t even discover America but only some islands off the East Coast, and he wasn’t even the first. The Scandinavian explorer Leif Erikson was 400 years ahead of him. It’s as if we live halfway in a dream, a false collective memory of a past that never was.
History is and always has been intensely political, distorted by power and patriotism, religion, economic interests and simply by what people want to believe. Politicians know this. “Who controls the past controls the present. Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell. Right now we can watch the past being rewritten almost as it happens, in the service of one ideology or another.
So we have to wait until the political dust settles before we can get a clearer picture of our own time and our own most admired men and women. Let’s hope it doesn’t take six hundred years.
