Columbus Day

An old friend who is a professor of political science read my last post and asked, why "no women" among the famous people I mentioned? He reminded me that in addition to Barry Commoner's death at 95, the great historian Eric Hobsbawm also died at 95 last week, though reported on page B19 instead of A1 of the same issue of the New York Times.

The two greatest lessons of history are "to the victor belong the spoils," and anicca, the Sanskrit word for "impermanence". How appropriate that the former was first uttered by a Nineteenth Century American in the early days of this country's long march to becoming the unrivaled superpower that it is today (New York Senator William Learned Marcy in 1832). The latter is one of the three marks of existence according to Buddhism, among the world's oldest teachings for how to overcome suffering; every victor is inevitably vanquished, though it can take years, generations or even millenia.

A friend sent me a press release last week, announcing his efforts to promote Italian-American culture. I was introduced to him by another friend who promotes Italian culture for a living—and with a much thicker Italian accent. She also introduced me to my first billionaire (yet another Italian American, but that's another story), and asked me once why I was surrounded by so many Italians rather than Jews like myself. Click on the map to my left to see the answer in terms of sheer statistical probability: Italians are the largest population by ancestry in the entire New York metro area.

In an article for London Review of Books on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery", Hobsbawm argues 1492 marked the first time in a thousand years that Europeans were engaged in conquering other lands rather than being conquered by Asians and Africans, a reversal that also included the expulsion from Spain of Jews and Muslim rulers. The Europeans expected to reshape the New World in their image, not the other way around. But the creative destruction that has transpired since then has been America's quintissential and hegemonic impact on the world.

Native populations have been vanquished throughout most of the Americas, now comprising less than 1% of the population in the U.S. and much of South America, but the map to the left shows they also still comprise major proportions of the population in some countries, as well as majorities in many subregions such as northern Canada. Click on the map below to see how despite this mass extermination over centuries, the echoes of these First Nations continue to reverberate in almost every American neighborhood today.

I am an assimilated American Jew, for example, living in a place called Weehawken, a word evolved from Lenape, meaning "rocks that look like trees" or maybe "at the end" (both probably refering to the mighty Palisades), having grown up celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Passover, and surrounded by a motley intergenerational mix of immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Cuba, Columbia, Dominican Republic, etc. The local, one-party (so-called "nonpartisan") spoils system is so complete and corrupt here that even the many local escapees from Communist states don't notice. Our political bosses are such masters of patronage that despite the occasional jail term, they would make "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em" Plunkitt of Tammany Hall proud, a direct lineage not only of 1492 but of the entire evolution of our species—one of the single greatest insights of a European in the New World.

My political science friend, who knew Hobsbawm personally, says he "despised the notion of identity in all its guises and took a lot of abuse and was marginalized in public discourse, mainly due to the liberal intellectuals who run the show in academia." It may seem anachronistic not to have named a famous woman (or, he might have added, person of color) in my last post. Feminists launched identity politics in its now multiple forms so many years ago, but it is easy to forget that it is all so recent in the grand scheme of things. With the same kind of statistical probability of my being surrounded by Italians, I could not possibly remember seeing a famous woman on a plane or person of color on the Upper East Side with the same ease that I can recall sitting across from Spalding Gray while we sipped hot chocolate on the top of a ski slope, because the forces of history had simply not allowed enough of them to reach such fame or fortune until just about now.

I could write ten more posts on the subject of identity politics in American history, and maybe I will. I think one I will call "Octoroon."