An Open Letter To Italian-Americans Protective of Columbus Day

Posted on October 12th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Something I wish I could say to any Italian-Americans angry at efforts to eliminate or rename Columbus Day, because to them it’s a holiday celebrating their ethnicity’s contributions to our history:

Dudes, or rather, Paisans, I know where you’re coming from.

We all like having a special day to celebrate the people we come from, and what they accomplished.

For you, being asked to give up Columbus Day must be a little like being asked to give up Christmas.

But here’s the issue.

It’s not that Columbus was evil. It’s that Columbus is lame.

Completely aside from Columbus having been a really bad guy, not just a “complicated” guy like Jefferson who had some good works to praise in addition to the personal conduct that establishes his feet of clay, but a genuinely bad guy, whose legacy is really not something you should be proud of, have you given any thought to the other message you send, by choosing him as your standard-bearer?

To wit: the guy you point to, to celebrate the contributions of Italian-Americans, was not an American by any definition.

He lived and died before there was a United States of America.

His day was five hundred years ago.

So, when you put him up as your great icon of the Italian experience in America, you are saying that in five hundred years, in half a millennium, in coming up on two hundred and fifty years of the United States as a country, when asked to name one (1) guy memorable enough to structure a holiday around, you can only come up with one guy who never even reached the mainland, and then NOBODY ELSE.

Do you really want to advance the thesis that it was Columbus, followed by nothing?

Columbus, and then all we can remember is various guys in pinstripe suits offing each other during spaghetti dinners?

Columbus, and Goodfellas?

Columbus is more than a crappy role model; he’s not even in the intended subset. He doesn’t celebrate who you are. He doesn’t celebrate what the best of you have done for this country. He doesn’t celebrate the reasons why your subculture needs to be admired. He’s old-world rapaciousness, not new-world innovation. Feeling protective and proprietary of his holiday is another way of saying, “Yeah, we did that, but somehow, we can’t think of anything else.” Which is really, really guys, I mean it, really, not giving yourselves nearly enough credit.

Go to your encyclopedias; go to your historians; go to your experts on the Italian-American immigrant experience.

I’ll lay odds it won’t take so much as a single day of research to come up with ten Italian-Americans more deserving of a holiday celebrating your influence on America. People you can be proud of, who everybody can be proud of – and if your argument is that none of them are currently as iconic as Columbus, then I’d submit that you deeply underestimate your talent at public relations.

Pick among them. Give us a less revolting hero. Then sell the hell out of him. Make him iconic.

And give us that person’s name on your holiday, instead of the man who set dogs on women and children, and encouraged rape as a tool of oppression.

Can’t you do that?

Seriously, I’m showing you respect by saying I really think you’d find it easy.

Tags: Columbus Day, Genocide, Italian Americans, Race | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Uncategorized

Recklessness and Malice

Posted on October 11th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

A certain piece of crap writing at his own little SF blog has repurposed a recent blog post about Ben Carson and in particular a paragraph sarcastically applying Carson’s logic about victims of mass shooters somehow at fault for not rushing their murderers, to American slaves not rushing their oppressors,, as  “minor sf writer Adam-Troy Castro’s racist attack on Ben Carson.”

A lie like this can go around the world ten times while the truth is still putting on its boots.

For the record, as anyone capable of reading comprehension should be able to tell, all of the “I woulda rushed them” examples cited there, including the slave graf, were offered alongside Ben Carson’s own argument, as examples of just how addlepated and self-serving Carson’s attack on the shooting victims was.

Deliberately separating the graf where I applied Carson’s logic to American slaves, without context, and presenting it as something I actually believe and endorse, is an act of extraordinary recklessness and malice.

Tags: Assholes, Ben Carson | Category Blog Business, Politics, Science Fiction

Writers: Bless Your Limitations. That’s Where You Find The Art.

Posted on October 10th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 10 October 2014

Here’s a secret.

All fiction writers have limitations.

All good fiction writers are acutely aware of their limitations.

All good fiction writers are therefore constantly working on ways to hide those limitations, to distract you from them, to wave their hands so that you don’t notice them.

And, if at all possible…to move them further away.

I know a very popular fiction writer who signed a contract to write a novel about a certain action hero. The problem is, this writer happened to be uncomfortable writing action. So whereas other books about this action hero have lengthy and elaborate fight scenes, this writer dedicated an entire novel to having the hero track down and find the villain…ending, finally, with the big fight about to happen. The last lines on the last plot-driven page said, pretty much, in about as many words, you know what happened next: he took the punishment, he went down, he got back up, and in the end he was the last one to get back up. Boom. Done.

Robert Cormier despaired of coming up with the words to describe a mansion. He called it a “big white birthday cake of a house.” Boom. Done.

Some fiction writers spend their careers writing inside their limitations, always using one kind of style and one kind of plot structure, to the point where it if you’ve read enough of their books you know the rhythm of the sentences before you read word one of the next one.

Others say, I don’t know if I can write this story, but the only way to find out is to start it.

I am a guy who winces, daily, from his limitations as a storyteller.

I am appalled by some of them.

I make a habit of starting and finishing stories that those limitations render difficult. I have been doing this since the late 1980s, when I made my first sales. The fences that imprison me are farther away than they used to be, but I am still aware of them; I have not pushed them beyond the horizon. As a result, I can still stroll through my stories and poke at places where I am acutely aware that I really did one thing because I was incapable of doing another. In the same sense that a moviemaker will sometimes have a character look off-screen and describe something a limited budget will not pay for…it is pretty much part of the process.

It is also necessary, for me.

I learned long ago that I cannot be one of those guys who has learned how to write one kind of story, and will always produce that kind of story. I get bored, terribly bored. So I write spare prose and I write ornate prose and I write tragedy and I write farce. The drawback of this is that readers who stay within genre are constantly saying what a shame it is that I don’t have a bigger name than I have; there are horror readers who have no idea I write science fiction and science fiction readers who have no idea I write horror and folks who have seen some of my more experimental stuff who have absolutely no idea that I also write squarely within genre lines. The advantage is that I spend less time being bored…and more time surprising myself by shifting the location of my fences.

My biggest advice to newbies?

Pick the kind of story you know you can’t write, and write it.

The limitations are where the art is.

Tags: Life Wisdom, Robert Cormier, writing | Category Books, Commentary, Life Wisdom, Science Fiction, Writing