"President Trump has put Columbus on a list of statues he wants included in his proposed National Garden of American Heroes. This week he said 'We’re back, Italians'..."

"... after he signed a proclamation for Columbus Day, a federal holiday he has called for celebrating after some cities and states have either replaced it or supplemented it with celebrations of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. 'Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces,' the proclamation reads...."

From "Beheaded and Sent to Watery Graves, Columbus Statues Get New Life/More than 30 monuments to Christopher Columbus were toppled or taken down in 2020. Now some are being restored, and finding new, usually less-public homes" (NYT).

"A statue of divisive European explorer Christopher Columbus that was on prominent display in Mexico City will be replaced with a figure of an Indigenous woman..."

"The looming Columbus figure had stood tall on the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard for over 100 years, but on Sunday the mayor of the capital city, Claudia Sheinbaum, said it was time for a change of landscape and to make way for a monument that delivers 'social justice.'... Last month, [President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador asked the country’s Indigenous peoples for forgiveness for the abuses inflicted on them during the bloody 1521 Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. He has previously called on Spain’s royal family and Pope Francis to formally apologize for atrocities committed during the Spanish conquest at the beginning of the 16th century.... For Mónica Moreno Figueroa, a Mexican academic in the United Kingdom and co-founder of the Collective to Eliminate Racism in Mexico (COPERA), the removal of the Columbus statue is 'symbolically important.'... However, simply replacing Columbus with a possibly anonymous Indigenous woman, in a country that is home to at least 50 Indigenous groups, lacked nuance...."

From "Statue of Christopher Columbus in Mexico City to be replaced by Indigenous female figure/The removal of statues of the explorer has been common in the United States and elsewhere as countries reckon with the public commemoration of their past" (WaPo).

Can I get a little attention? Does anybody care this year? Seems like they would... this year, especially, but no... Anybody?

It's Columbus Day, but there's way less than the usual hoopla, even though you'd think there'd be more. I found this in the Washington Post, "Much of America has stopped celebrating Columbus Day, but the explorer remains revered in Italy." That's super mild. The observation that has replaced the observation of: There used to be an observation of the holiday, and now there's only the observation that the holiday is no longer observed.  

While many Christopher Columbus statues were toppled this year in the United States — dragged into Baltimore's Inner Harbor, beheaded in Boston — the towering marble monument to the explorer in his hometown, Genoa, Italy, is disturbed only by pigeons....

 “Some vague awareness of his colonialist brutality has only in the last few years made it into classrooms,” said Marina Nezi, a recently retired high school history teacher in Rome. “But [Italy has] a very long history, and school years are often not enough to tell the whole of it.”...  

“There’s a firewall of Italianness that has prevented the critique from breaking through and garnering a meaningful following,” [said Giulio Busi, author of “Christopher Columbus, the Sailor of Secrets."] Toppling his statues “feels like an attack on our nationality.”...

Did you know that with a firewall of Italianness, you can stop critique from garnering?   

In the New York Times, Christopher Columbus hasn't even been mentioned since October 9th. There's not even the observation that the holiday is not observed. Which is to say, it's really not observed. They didn't even see it. They didn't even see the non-seeing of it!

Now, the New York Post offers a cry for us to respect the old tarnished hero. It's a column by David Marcus: