Donald Trump saddles up a Chicago hobbyhorse — Christopher Columbus

Certain issues just seem to belong to Chicago. Dibs, for instance. That peculiar tradition of trying to claim a parking space with a few scattered chairs, or dinette tables, or whatever, just because you took the trouble of shoveling it out. A weird blend of private effort and public display, these fragile monuments to selfishness. "I went to the trouble to clear the public way, so the space now belongs to me." There's something tragic about dibs; I sometimes snowblow the sidewalks of my entire block; I don't then try to stop people from walking there.

So it stood out, from the general wrongness of everything happening in Washington, D.C., to see Donald Trump's White House leap into the Christopher Columbus fight, erecting a statue of the great explorer near the grounds of the White House early Sunday morning. Truly, it was as if the president had issued an executive order banning ketchup on hot dogs, not to give him any ideas.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero," a spokesman declared.

I bet he is. Columbus's heroism has curdled in some quarters, particularly after the 2020 George Floyd protests, when the exact degree that our government values the lives of people who didn't have the good sense to be born white came into sharp relief. Suddenly, deifying Confederate traitors and rampaging colonizers couldn't be shrugged off quite so easily.

Columbus statues were taken down in other cities across the country, such as Boston, Richmond and Pittsburgh. Baltimore's was broken into pieces and tossed into the Inner Harbor. The statue erected on the White House grounds, in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, was created by an artist working from the shattered Baltimore statue, fished out of the water.

Still, Columbus seems a uniquely Chicago concern. Maybe because the city yanked three Columbus statues off the street in 2020. Maybe just from watching close up the day-to-day gyrations of old-school Italian pride groups trying to make the case that once someone is honored in a public space he therefore must be honored forever, no matter how tastes change. The issue resembles school prayer, where specific groups insist their own private devotions become mandatory public ritual.

Maybe because Columbus, while known around the world, has been a particular fixation in Chicago, where the city's monumental 1893 fair was dubbed "The World's Columbian Exposition," part of the 19th century trend of celebrating Columbus for discovering the continent. An effort picked up enthusiastically by Italian immigrants, who at the time played the despised outsider role now forced upon Venezuelans. Columbus became demonized in the 21st century for his rough handling of the discovered — raping and torturing and murdering them more than many like to see in our public heroes. (Odd that he would go to bat for him.)

As a historically minded person, I generally don't like to see statues pulled down. It smacks of the Taliban blowing up Buddhas. There is an enormous statue of Stephen Douglas at 35th Street, just west of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Douglas was not only a slaveholder, but a notoriously neglectful slaveholder. Yet the edifice remains, and rightly so, because it's historic and in a part of the city not otherwise bristling with tourist sites. Besides, it's also Douglas' tomb, and it could be argued that everyone, no matter how vile, gets to slumber in his own grave.

Statue smashing is the plucking of low-hanging fruit by those frustrated by society's lack of progress. We might not be able to live in a fair or just nation — we're certainly taking the long road. But we can tear down statues.

I come to the Columbus dispute as a fan of many things Italian: biscotti, pasta, Verdi, Dante — the list goes on. While not a fan of others — fascism, what Italians call bloccato nel passato, or being stuck in the past. The man Italians chose to elevate themselves in American society 125 years ago is now a millstone, pulling them down.

The past remains outside our control. Columbus doesn't care about the condition of his statues, just as the suffering of a single Arawak is not alleviated by removing Columbus statues. What we are fighting over is the future. Trump and his followers are trying to hustle us all back to their imagined past, where Black history is Crispus Attucks killed at the Boston Massacre, and Brown races generally exist in rightsless limbo, picking strawberries and staying out of sight.

The White House statement regarding Columbus the hero added: "President Trump will ensure he’s honored as such for generations to come.”

Will he? That seems to imply Trump will be running the show for generations to come. That certainly seems the plan.