Oh, man. First, the ProJo runs a cartoon of Gordon Fox, the African-American Majority Leader of RI’s House of Representatives, as a shoe-shine boy.
And then this poor, stupid Keith Dellagrotta kid goes and says this:
“As the ultimate politically correct move, the naive, arrogant, haughty Brown faculty last year decided to side with American Indians, less than 1 percent of Brown’s student body, and change the name of Columbus Day weekend to Fall Weekend,” said Keith Dellagrotta ’10, president of the Brown Republicans, in a speech at the rally.
“Universities like Brown seek to diminish the importance of Christianity in the founding of the United States, but they will never win that battle,” Dellagrotta said. “American Indians knew not Christianity, and thus lacked the bedrock to construct a great United States of America as we know it today. Columbus, however, was their saving grace.”
The Daily Dose hereby demands that the Brown College Republicans, the College Republicans of RI, the State Republican Party, and rally host John DePetro respectively either confirm or dis-confirm their support for Dellagrotta’s remarks. We’ll just keep on presuming your concurrence until we hear otherwise…
It really seems like faulty logic you are using, buthere… let me try.
“I hereby demand that President Obama either confirm or dis-confirm his support for female genital circumcision. I’ll just keep on presuming his concurrence with the practice until I hear otherwise…”
Hey that’s fun!
I’m sorry.. I’m perplexed to why anyone actually cares about the Brown protests. There are dissenters to everything. Are they dumb? Yes. Are they enacting change to the policy? No. There are plenty of dumb people in Rhode Island, what is the point in focusing on these? In regards the shoe shine thing, give it a rest. I feel more hate coming from your column then I do that cartoon. I saw it and didn’t perceive it to be race related. I saw it simply as Fox doing *anything* to make his superiors happy. Hmm.. I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t notice stuff like race.
So for you, I quote Colonel Potter from M*A*S*H: “Just remember, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way.”
If you think that statement is moronic, you should have heard this kid on John’s show this morning talking about the Gordon Fox cartoon. This kid is a parody of himself, Rhody’s own male version of Sarah Palin.
Imagine this kid’s chagrin when reads about the Six Nations chiefs (Iroquois Nation) going down to Philly in June, 1776 to deliver speeches to the Continental Congress on the eve of the Declaration.
Does that prove the so-called Influence Thesis that key framers (Franklin, Madison) were directly influenced by the representative democracy that pre-dated the US Constitution by, I don’t know, several centuries? Prolly not.
This link covers the controversy around the Influence Thesis.
The entire mythology of Columbus is predicated on some pretty murky history, much of it sanitised over the years. He wasn’t the first European in the Americas (that was probably Leif Erikson), he never set foot or eye on the mainland, he was more or less lost (he was thousands of miles from where he thought he was), and from all accounts, he was quite cruel to the natives he met — exploiting them for the riches he desired (and actually needed, to recoup the cost of the trip) and brutally punishing them when they fell short. Really not such a swell guy, over all, and not quite the heroic discoverer he’s often made out to be.
It’s also not true that most people believed in a flat world at the time — almost no one did. Even the ancient Greeks knew the world was round, and it was common knowledge by his time. His mistake was in assuming it was much smaller than it really is, and his original intent was to prove that a western passage to India was shorter than the perilous trip around the horn of Africa. He was of course entirely wrong about that. He not only mistook Hispaniola for a part of the Indies, he further mistook a rather small island for the mainland.
As Matt pointed out, it’s odd that Italians celebrate him, as he sailed for Spain, and claimed the New World in their name, not for Italia. And Italia of this era was not as it is today. Italia did not unify as a nation until the mid 19th Century, centuries later. In Columbus’ time, it was still a gang of loosely affiliated (and sometimes warring) nation-states. He was therefore not ‘Italian’ in any modern sense, but Genoese, a distinct Italian ethnic and political identity distinct from others. His affiliation with Spain was also directly contradictory to the larger interests of most Italians of the time, in that it sought to gain access to the vital global spice trade, at the time largely controlled by Arabs and Italians.
This is also only the traditionally accepted view. He might not even have been Genoese, or any other kind of Italian. More recent speculation is that he may have been Catalan, or Portuguese. No one really knows for sure.
Mr. Dellagrotta may be speaking from a combination of Italian pride and historical ignorance, but his assumption that only Native Americans have reason to dispute the celebration of Columbus is misplaced. If historical records have any truth, then any decent people have reason to question our elevation of a bumbling opportunist of uncertain origin and deplorable practices to the level that we have.
I’m just bitter because Amtrak jacked up rates yesterday for this, and the Post Office was closed.
While this Keith kid is an idiot, I think Brown’s change is just as idiotic and meaningless. They still give a day off (in fact, this year it was on Columbus Day). If they wanted it to be meaningful, don’t close in October.
Hey, maybe the right is right – there certainly is some ignorant, misguided youth at Brown (of which Mr. Dellagrotta is Exhibit A). Pssst, Keith…the state in which you are furthering your education was founded on freedom of religion. You’ll find the rest easy.
I was shocked to read this story in the Daily Herald today. I’m a current student who was formerly ambivalent to the name change. Keith Dellagrotta just demonstrated to me why I was wrong and should have strongly supported the change.
Unfortunately, this is the myth, older than the college Republicans or any of us. You see, anyone who is not Christianized will burn in hell forever. That justifies anything you do to unbelievers– it’s for their own good.
For zealots like this, Democracy is a means to an end, history is propaganda, winners take all and the rest put up or shut up.
You all will have a long wait, these “closet” racists will never distance themselves from these comments as they can spin/justify them to themselves and their listeners. By the way i’m sure they’ll find a way to blame Obama too.