Don Pesci: Taking down Columbus and a mau-mauing in New Haven

Bronze statue of Christopher Columbus, formerly situated at Wooster Square, in New Haven. The statue was removed by the city Parks Commission on June 24, 2020.

A video published by the New Haven Independent showing New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker being mau-maued by Los Fidel, not his birth name, the day after a Columbus statue had been booted from Wooster Square Park may not be a vote-getter for Elicker during his next campaign.

Two days after the removal of the statue by the Park Commission, not the city’s elected Board of Alderman, tempers were still sparking.

“You should have been here,” Fidel told Elicker.

“Everyone makes mistakes, and I make mistakes,” Elicker responded. In retrospect, Elicker confessed, “he should have been in Wooster Square rather than in his office at City Hall on Wednesday.”

On the day of removal, Elicker had been at a safe distance from the park in his office attending to business. Two days later, he ventured out and met with about 30 protesters who had cheered as the offending statue had been carted off.

“Sitting on the grass in a circle with the group,” The New Haven Independent reported, “Elicker spent most of the first hour listening to Fidel tell his story, interspersed with critiques of the mayor. (Watch the full conversation in the video above.)”

The video captures Fidel hurling imprecations at the mayor. “F**k you!” critiqued Fidel at one point.

His manners exquisitely intact, Elicker responded, “That’s not respectful.”

Fidel’s story was poignant:

“I’m looking at the f**king white devil," Fidel said at another point. He then apologized for his manner, and wiped away tears as he recounted getting punched in the back of the head and having slurs shouted at him Wednesday.

Fidel spoke of the many times he has been arrested over the years, for charges including felony possession of a deadly weapon and driving under the influence. He said his first arrest came at 13, and that the deadly weapon charge had to do with fishing equipment and was exaggerated by police.

He expressed how he has felt traumatized by law enforcement growing up in Bridgeport and living in New Haven for over 15 years.

"I’m a felon. I’ve been arrested for things I didn’t do my whole life," Fidel said. He said law enforcement has falsely targeted him. "I stabbed somebody in self-defense." He said he was charged with operating a "drug factory," when in fact, he said, he had less than an ounce of marijuana at his place. (According to court records, he has been found guilty of second-degree assault, probation violation, larceny, and reckless endangerment, among other offenses.)

To be sure, life in the city under the glare of the hypercritical police is no walk in the park. But Elicker’s problem, purely political, is a bit different than Fidel’s. Will the whole affair surrounding the removal of a mute statue help or hurt Elicker politically? It may seem obscene to people who are not professional politicians, but politicians, as a general rule, have an eye cocked on political loss or gain when they engage in politics. And politicians are always on the job, so to speak, always politicking, whether they are hugging babies or, in the midst of a Coronavirus outbreak, not hugging babies.

Other protesters joined in the conversation after Fidel had recovered his manners. “Disband police officers that have lost their legitimacy because they are working as an occupying force and stealing wealth from African-American communities,” one recommended.

Elicker responded that he was “prioritizing moving along appointments and seating the police Civilian Review Board… ‘I think there are opportunities to civilianize the police force,’ Elicker said. He said he sees opportunities to have police officers show up to fewer calls, which can be diverted to other responders,” the cri de coeur of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

So it goes in New Haven, and much of this is “deja vu all over again,” in Yogi Bera’s memorable phrase,  for people familiar withThomas Wolfe’s still readable essays published in a book titled Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

Here is Wolfe carefully probing the difference between a confrontation and a demonstration in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers:

A demonstration, like the civil-rights march on Washington in 1963, could frighten the white leadership, but it was a general fear, an external fear, like being afraid of a hurricane. But in a confrontation, in mau-mauing, the idea was to frighten white men personally, face to face. The idea was to separate the man from all the power and props of his office. Either he had enough heart to deal with the situation or he didn't. It was like to saying, "You--yes, you right there on the platform--we're not talking about the government, we're not talking about the Office of Economic Opportunity--we're talking about you, you up there with your hands shaking in your pile of papers ..."

Intimidation of this kind may not be “respectful” – but it works well enough in New Haven.

D0n Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

Don Pesci: Deep historical ignorance fuels push to moth-ball Columbus statues

Statue of Christopher Columbus in Seaside Park, in Bridgeport, Conn.

VERNON, Conn.

Christopher Columbus statues across Connecticut are being mothballed, but politicians in the state’s larger cities desperately want Italians to understand, in the words of Don Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, “It’s nothing personal.”

The pols in Connecticut, a state that has in it more Italians per square inch than most others, still need Italian votes. Will Italians, during the next elections, turn on anti-Columbus (and moth-balling supporters) such as Mayor Justin Elicker, of New Haven, and Mayor Luke Bronin, of Hartford? Italians, everyone knows from reading Puzo, like their revenge cooled in the fridge.

Both mayors have given Columbus statues the boot. Bronin said, “When the statue of Columbus was erected in Hartford a hundred years ago, it was meant to symbolize the fact that Italian-Americans, who had faced intense discrimination, had a place in the American story. But surely we can find a better way to honor the immense contributions of the Italian-American community in our country and in our community. I’ll also be working with our Italian-American community in Hartford and throughout the region to find an appropriate way to honor their incredibly important place in Hartford’s and our nation’s history.”

And Elicker concurred: “The Christopher Columbus statue for many Italians is a celebration of Italian heritage. But the statue of Christopher Columbus also represents a time of colonialism and atrocities committed. It is the right decision to remove the statue. After the statue is removed, I believe it is important that we, as a community, have a conversation about how to best honor the heritage of so many Italians who have made New Haven their home.”

Whomever these mayors have in mind for suitable stand-ins for Columbus – no names have been mentioned – none of the stand-ins will have been credited with opening the new continent to European exploration, the real irritant in the craws of Columbus haters.    

The assault on Columbus by "Black Lives  Matter" is particularly annoying because it is so wrong-headed. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, as we were taught to recite in schools long before it became fashionable to celebrate tribal differences in the United States under the rubric of diversity. We are quickly becoming “many out of one,” reversing the E Pluribus Unum motto on our increasingly worthless coinage.The first slaves were brought to what later became the United States – now the clannish dis-United States – in 1619, long after the death of Columbus. Certainly Columbus is less responsible for slavery and the oppression of African-Americans than, say, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the original Jim Crow.

Jim Crow was a fictional character created by “Daddy” Rice, around 1830, a little more than three decades before the father of the Republican Party, President Abraham Lincoln, issued his Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the midst of a bloody, corpse filled Civil War waged, among other reasons, to end slavery.

Rice was a “black face,” white minstrel artist who introduced Jim Crow, a fictional stereotypical slave, into his act. As his show became more and more popular, the expression “Jim Crow” became a widely used designation for blacks, and later, around the time Republican President  Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to facilitate the desegregation of public schools, the expression became a battle cry against racial discrimination in the south – not that the north was Simon-pure with respect to a poisonous tribalization of races that militated against E Pluribus Unum.

Hey, they don’t teach this sort of stuff anymore in Yale or Harvard; or, for that matter, in Hartford and New Haven high schools.

The whole business of discrimination still resonates with many Italians. The largest lynching in the United States occurred in 1891 -- 385 years after Columbus, certainly among the greatest navigators of his age and the man responsible for opening the Americas to a European discovery, died in obscurity, bleeding from his eyes at his home in Spain – when a New Orleans mob murdered 11 Italian-Americans following a trial of the Catholic “dagoes,” accused of murdering a police chief, that had produced six not-guilty verdicts and three mistrials. New Orleans was impatient for the justice of the rope, and so the innocent men were strung up.

Ah, well, stuff happens. Scripture tells us none of us are perfect, and history, we know, is pockmarked with imperfections. Democratic President Obama used to tell us that the details of history were less important than the arc of history. Modern historians and students -- engaged, like air-brusher Joseph Stalin, in the art of revising history through the murder of his political opponents – seem to think that the arc of history is less important than their own fictional version of the way things ought to have been during the days of Columbus.

The above named mayors of major cities in Connecticut have all claimed they are performing a public service by ridding public squares of Columbus statues to prevent vandalism, which is on a par with closing banks to prevent bank robberies or closing police stations to prevent arsonists from burning them down or tolerating the vandalization of the Lincoln Memorial by historical amnesiacs who have not, before despoiling the memorial, read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address engraved on the north wall of the memorial. In merry old England a statue of Churchill – who, along with President Franklin Roosevelt, wiped the noses of real Fascists in the dust – has been vandalized, likely by European anti-fascist-fascists, brothers and sisters in arms with domestic terrorists such as ANTIFA here in the USA.

Are there no video cameras that might be deployed around Columbus statues to apprehend and arrest the vandals? Are we truly incapable of making proper distinctions between peaceful, lawful protesters and the thugs who shield themselves behind licit protests to liberate Louis Vuitton stores of bags that may be sold on the black market to finance, among other things, the toppling of Columbus statues in Connecticut?

An Italian from New Haven writes me, that he wishes someone would say something “to let the public know that not everyone is complicit” in what he and most Italians regard as the usual, time honored anti-Italian, anti-Catholic historical revisionism.

Done.

My correspondent tells me he plans to vote in the upcoming November elections – after cool, revengeful deliberation -- to strike a blow for historical lucidity, liberty under law and those few politicians in Connecticut who find distasteful the destruction of public monuments in the state’s urban cultural war-zones.   

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Always a surplus of brutality

"Landing of Columbus '' (12 October 1492), by John Vanderlyn.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Columbus Day this year predictably included denunciations of the explorer and the colonialists who accompanied and followed him. Columbus, et al., were presented as world-historically brutal and are blamed for presiding over a huge genocide. This aroused a lot of backlash in southern New England, with its many proudItalian-Americans. (But I have always wondered why someone would be proud, or ashamed, of what a distant ancestor did.)

But members of Native American tribes were just as brutal to members of other tribes and to European usurpers. They just didn’t have the equipment (particularly guns) to defeat the far more technologically advanced Europeans, and, of course, their numbers rapidly declined after the European arrival because they didn't have immunity from the diseases brought over from Europe.

As for the African slaves brought over to the Americas by Europeans, we ought to remember that it was African chiefs who captured these poor souls and sold them to the Europeans. For that matter, slavery still exists in Africa.

People of all shades and nationalities are brutal. 

Don Pesci: No, Columbus was not a fascist

The Inspiration of Christopher Columbus, by José María Obregón, 1856.

“Authorities say the statues [of Christopher Columbus] at Harbor Park in Middletown {Conn.} and Wooster Square in New Haven were vandalized overnight Saturday. The paint has been cleaned up,'' from the Associated Press.

On Aug. 21, The Baltimore Sun reported that a monument to Christopher Columbus had been vandalized by vandals, a perfect word to describe the members of Antifa, a group that claims to be anti-fascist, but does not scruple to employ the methods of fascists, including the beating of non-violent protesters by masked, black-clad brownshirts.

Columbus, we may state with certainty, was not a fascist. We know this because fascism dates from Mussolini’s reign in Italy, well after Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Neither did Columbus approve of slavery; nor did his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. According to a story printed in The Hill, a Washington, D.C., publication, “it was Spain that forbade slavery of most Native Americans and made them Spanish citizens.”

The Hill also noted “that Columbus seems to have faced arrest by his fellow explorers for punishing — even executing — those who had abused Native Americans.” The zealot “most often cited in smearing Spanish exploration and with it Columbus,” The Hill noted, was “Bartolome De Las Casas … the one who proposed African slavery for the New World.”

One can’t expect members of  Antifa, an anarco-Marxist movement, to take notice of such exculpatory data before they deface statues or infiltrate peaceful protests for the purpose of creating havoc and suppressing free speech. Nihilists and anarchists are not likely to be dissuaded by sweet reason, which appears to infuriate them. The defacement of the Columbus monument in Baltimore was recorded on YouTube by the defacer for posterity and the delectation of his fellow brownshirts.

While falsely claiming to be anti-fascist, Antifa effortlessly bridges Marxism and fascism. Fascism, like anarchism and nihilism, is ungoverned dynamism. It is pure spirit, void of reason, murderously directed to an end – the destruction of life, property and culture.

As early as 1914, Albert Camus tells us in his book The Rebel, Mussolini “proclaimed the ‘holy religion of anarchy,’ and declared himself the enemy of every form of Christianity.”  Camus adds, “Men of action, when they are without faith, never believe in anything but action… To those who despair of everything” – here Camus had in mind post World War I Germany – “not reason, but only passion, can provide a faith.” Dynamism for dynamism’s sake is an act of contempt for both past and future. Camus again: “Fascism is an act of contempt, in fact. Inversely, every form of contempt, if it intervenes in politics, prepares the way for, or establishes, Fascism.”

Columbus and those who still admire him, while conscious of the defects he shared with his own age, can never be friendly toward the Ku Klux Klan The fury of the KKK was of course directed pitilessly at African-Americans. But the KKK was also contemptuous of Jews and Catholics, and this boundless contempt was expressed in violent acts against the faith of non-Protestants who were not Anglo Saxon.  The African American Antifa enthusiast who destroyed the Baltimore statue of Columbus was, by his act of contempt, marching hand in hand with the Ku Klux Klan.

Bill DeBlasio, the mayor of New York City, still teeming with Italian-Americans, is considering removing a statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle. That monument was dedicated in 1941, 50 years after the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. The lynching of 11  Italian Americans occurred after a trial in which 19 Sicilians had been indicted in the murder of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy. The jury regarded the evidence presented at trial as highly suspect and insufficient. Six defendants were acquitted and a mistrial was declared for the remaining three because the jury failed to agree on their verdicts. A mob incited by a lawyer, William Parkerson, and led by John Wickliffe, editor of the New Delta newspaper, advanced on the prison shouting “We want the Dagoes!” and murdered the exonerated Sicilians.

Some newspapers of the day approved the vigilante injustice. The New York Times, covering itself in blood and shame,  editorialized, “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they... Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.”

The modern descendants of the lynch mob – including, anti-capitalist Marxists, anarco-fascists, the KKK and Antifa – have now taken to lynching statues of Columbus, erected in part as a rebuke to lawless anarchy and the terrible silence surrounding the hateful prejudices that make lynching possible. Silence in the face of anarchy and cultural dissolution is itself an approval of anarchy and cultural disintegration. In an anarchic universe, we have nothing to lose -- but everything.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist,