YOUNGSTOWN — U.S. Rep. Michael Rulli, R-Salem, introduced a bill that would punish any local or state government that celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day.
Called the “Italian Heroes and Heritage Act,” Rulli’s bill would prohibit federal funds to local or state governments that have replaced Columbus Day, which is Monday, with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Rulli’s bill doesn’t address local or state governments that celebrate both, stating it would apply to those that celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day “in lieu of Columbus Day.”
Rulli, an Italian American, said the day recognizes the “generations of Italian Americans whose courage, sacrifice and hard work have helped shape the United States.”
Rulli, whose 11-county district has Mahoning as its most populous, said, “For years, the extreme left has desecrated statues of Christopher Columbus and sought to erase Columbus Day, replacing it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This is not about inclusion, it is about erasing the contributions of millions of Italian Americans who helped build this nation. Indigenous peoples deserve recognition, but this day was created to honor us.”
Columbus Day was first celebrated as a federal holiday in 1934 in the United States on Oct. 12 and then moved to the second Monday in October starting in 1971.
Rulli’s bill mentions that President Benjamin Harrison founded the day in 1892 — 400 years after Columbus’ arrival in the Americas — to honor that voyage and the lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans because of their heritage.
Harrison’s recognition was a one-time national celebration.
The joke is that Italy wasn’t a unified state? Columbus wasn’t an Italian as in “a citizen of the Italian state,” but it’s still the Italian Peninsula. One can argue about the precise inception of Italian nationhood and how that maps on to Columbus’s biography, but I don’t think statehood itself is likely the way to do that except if you’re trying to talk about a minority group within Italy’s territory being folded into Italian identity when it wasn’t previously part of the nation of Italy.
Though I guess, based on how some sociologists and linguists talk about it, perhaps it would be more accurate to say he’s “Italic” or something, as though that would communicate something to most people and have anything to do with what label he himself would or wouldn’t say applies to him. That’s a back-formation from how they say “Turkic” or “Iranic” though, I don’t really know.
He would have identified as from Genoa which, as indicated, is along the coast next to the Italian peninsula. He would not have seen himself as a co-nationalist with Sicilians for example (i.e. Tony Soprano). Italian, as being used by the Congressman, is an anachronism. That’s the joke.
I looked it up and apparently Genoa was pretty separate from Italian nationhood prior to unification, so on that basis the original joke is fair enough.
I still think the map isn’t a good account of why and also Genoa clearly is mostly on the peninsula, like 80% (but for the initial prompt I admit this doesn’t matter without people addressing the area in a collective way like they did for Greek city states).
I finally received purpleworms approval for a throwaway joke. I feel like the famous Turkish Hero, Constantine the Great.
I further grant that that’s a good one and made me laugh.
Hell yeah. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Look its impossible to put nationalism back in the bag but it’s important to contemporize nationalism as something that was created and unfamiliar to people wrapped up in the current territorial extents and national myths of the nations. The only people talking about italy in 1492 were nerds like Machiavelli and mostly through a nostalgia towards the roman empire.