Colónic Irritation

After the usual grumbles about censoring history (which grumbles were remarkably muted in the West while Communist effigies were being unpedestalled in the wake of the USSR's collapse) the mayor of Chicago has sanctioned the discreet removal of a statue of Christopher Columbus. A Genoese entrepreneur and pioneer of Republican Party values, Columbus attained his heroic status by discovering the New World a mere handful of centuries after the Norsemen and only a few millennia after sundry proto-Olmecs, proto-Toltecs and other uninteresting creatures. Although Columbus had to fight for his rights at a time when Italian-Americans were still a minority in the Chicago area, the modern-day forces of political correctness are trying to blame him for the genocide of the native societies. This is unjust: those natives not murdered, enslaved or starved were mostly wiped out by European diseases, and Columbus and his colleagues, whose acquaintance with modern medicine was barely superior to that of the present-day United States, presumably ascribed the visitation of the Angel of Smallpox to the natives' heathen religious customs, which among other enormities substituted human sacrifice for witch-burning. The removal of the statue comes as the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble make ready to crack down on public disorder with an election only slightly in the offing; and if there is one lesson from history which America doesn't need to learn, it is the one about undertaking ill-planned projects with corrupt and incompetent administrators during an outbreak of fatal disease.