So many American civic holidays of my youth seem to be getting the axe these days, in our modern age of woke rejectionism: intolerable public relics of a horridly white, male, colonialist past. (Columbus? Won’t see him no more.) As my colleague Jack Butler cautions, Thanksgiving is seemingly the next to feel the squeeze. Given the light recently shed on the evils of “settler-colonialism” by our younger and more properly educated betters currently out in the streets waving the flag for Hamas, it seems like no American holiday so nakedly based on our settler forebears’ scraping by with the help of people they’d later wholly overawe was going to last long.
And honestly, I’m offended too. I’m offended by the whole damn racket, this business of people just up and conquering other people. I’ve had it up to here with the intolerable cruelties of the colonialist yoke, and speaking as a typically overeducated yet acceptably mainstream public commentator, I declare: It’s time to break with tradition. I’ve gotten “woke” myself. I now feel moved to write, with all the disgust and anger I can muster about this unworthiest of all races, “A Brief History of Settler-Colonialism.” For I reject humanity and all of its works.
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