There are few columnists I look forward to reading in the Boston Globe more than than James Carroll. Why? Because few people who write for a major daily newspaper are so myopic and unabashedly socialist and racist in their worldview. Takes a big man to write like he does and do so with a straight face. His column yeaterday about Columbus Day is an absolute corker, and while I’d love to pick it apart like a cold piece of chicken straight outta the fridge at midnight, I don’t have to – Captain’s Quarters’ Ed Morrissey has done it for me and you. You can check his whole post here, but here’s the a portion of the drubbing he gives Carroll:

I would have bet money that no columnist in America could have painted such an incoherent and essentially false version of 500 years of Western civilization in just three paragraphs. People of intellectual heft generally have to spend years on dissertations being this dishonest and biased. Carroll may be the most efficient intellectual fraud in North America, a status to which he laid claim on Labor Day as well.

Columbus Day celebrates the opening of the Western Hemisphere to Western civilization — the potential and the opportunity, not every single event that followed from it. Without that opening, the United States would not exist, at least not in its current form. Plenty of good flowed from that potential, none of which makes it into Carroll’s essay on Columbus.
Plenty of bad flowed from it as well, although almost none of what Carroll chooses to use as examples.

He also talks about torture, without giving a single shred of evidence that the US has tortured anyone. Carroll then asks “what about those who welcomed [Columbus]”, apparently blissfully unaware about their own thoughts on what we consider torture and war crimes today. It’s history without any historical context, a specialty of Carroll’s. Slavery and torture have long histories in all corners of the world, and although Carroll apparently remains ignorant of it, still exist in reality in large sections of Africa and Asia, two places on which Columbus never set foot.

People like James Carroll are the reason why journalism has de-evolved into the dismal state it is today. Look, any 5th or 6th grader (I hope) could tell you that history is not black and white – it reverberates down through the ages – and if you look hard enough you can draw positives and negatives from just about anything that has happened in the past; even if the only good derives from the lessions humankind has (hopefully) learned. There is not one people created by God since the beginning of time that can be considered unblemished in the way they treated not just other people but their own as well. It’s just convenient for those like Carroll to use the West as a symbol of everything that has ever gone wrong with the world. The sad thing is, if Carroll truly believes what he writes, his existence in a Western free-market economy and culture must be a miserable one indeed.

I feel sorry for him.