Every year in October, against the backdrop of the Columbus Day/ Indigenous People day duality, I remember a singular event in my grammar school history. With lots of Italian-Americans (me included) in my class, a girl named Georgina was invited to sing a song about Cristoforo Columbo.
“Christopher Columbus didn’t have a compass, didn’t have a measure, as he traveled on. Though the days were windy, swore he’d reach the Indies, but he reached America, as he traveled on.” And additional lyric propaganda designed to inculcate us with the standard narratives.
And in some Italian-American kids, those narratives played on their ethnicity, so that they grew to adulthood still celebrating this arsehole as the pinnacle of Italian pride, celebrating the scumbag and resisting — even violently — attempts to express the actual history, the genocide of a people, whom Columbus ironically called “una gente in dios”. Indians, godly people. Unfortunately, didn’t stop them from dying at the hands of the stronzo colonizers like good old Cristo.
And so I think about all the subtle but effective conduits by which propaganda seeps into our brains. In this case teaching NUNS with a completely inadequate grasp of history, but free access to training young minds to be serfs to the status quo.