Author: jpm

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My Oliver Cromwell / Thanksgiving Story

The most interesting thing about King Charles I…

I start so many things I write with that line. It is the opening lyric from a Monty Python song:

It serves as a sort of throat-clearing; gets the fingers moving and the brain spinning, so to speak. I’ve yet to accidently leave it in a final draft.

This article has nothing to do with King Charles I. Well, not directly.

I spent the better part of a year living in England when I was 21. It was my Junior Year of college at Juniata. Everyone was encouraged to study abroad back then. I assume they still are.

Back to KC I, or rather his nemesis, Oliver Cromwell spit. (I’ll explain the spitting shortly.)

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England

If you aren’t familar with Ollie C, you should be. You can look him up on Wikipedia if you’d like, or go listen to that Youtube clip I posted. Or I can tell you about him here: Short version, he decided KCI was bad for England, so he chopped off his head and ran the country as Lord Protector until his own death. The British then restored the Monarchy with King Charles II.

Cromwell was a Puritan, the same folks who got lost at sea and landed at Plymouth. Fancy things were verboten. Even buttons were ostentatious. So he and his men set about the country, removing all things decadent and offensive.

While in England, I toured at least a dozen churches, nearly as many castles, and a number of other historic sites. In every case, the tourguide or docent would tell us about the role of their particular building in the Civil War. You could tell they held Cromwell in disdain. No one ever went to go so far as to spit after saying his name, but I came to take it as read.

H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken

The University where I was studying was in Lincoln. I remember one room in Lincoln Cathedral where the gold inlay was still intact on a particular coffin. It had been up against a wall when Cromwell’s men came through, prying the gold, jewels, and other filigree from anything in the church. I assume the enthusiasm with which his men removed these valuables had nothing to do with greed and was driven purely by their pious hearts.

That’s my Oliver Cromwell story. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

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Winter is a time for creativity

The winter holidays bring out the creativity in people. I don’t know why exactly, but my current theory is that time of year is steeped in myth. Modern myths. Old myths. Truly ancient myths. The birth of the Christians’ Messiah being only one of the more recent entrants.


The Russians have Snegurka (“Snow Maiden”) and Dedushka Moroz (“Old Man (or Father) Frost”). The English, Old Man Winter and Jack Frost. The Norse had Vetr (Old Norse, “Winter”).1

There are older myths, too. For some, we have only fragments.2

In spring and summer we can ignore our own mortality. But winter suffers no fools. The elements can truly kill you if you aren’t careful – and even if you are. As the days get shorter and shorter, leading up to the Winter Solstice, even we secular humanists start looking for meaning in the world. Once it is officially “winter,” we know we have made it half way to the warmth, life, and rebirth of Spring.

What I most enjoy about this time of year – other than the food – are the retellings of myths. A number of authors I know have done some interesting things around Santa Claus in particular. In no particular order:

Charles Stross: “Overtime”

Jim Hines: “Frosty”

Nerd Rage: “Frost-Born”

Penny Arcade: “The Last Christmas”

There are many more. These are just a few of my more recent favorites.

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1. If you trace these things back far enough, some of them converge. [return]
2. Presumably their adherents have long since frozen to death. [return]

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Columbus Day

By now I assume you’ve read Matthew Inman’s “Columbus Day” at The Oatmeal. If you haven’t, I’ll wait. Come back and I’ll talk about holidays and what they mean…

Public holidays are aspirational. Take Memorial Day, for instance. We don’t honor our war dead in ceremonies for their benefit, thus ensuring their safe passage in the afterlife. What we are doing when we honor the dead is saying that their sacrifice mattered, and we are grateful, and that by the communicative property of social cohesion, our own sacrifices are also honorable and worthy of respect, and others are grateful for what we do, too. We recognize our connection to the past, and we would seek to emulate the past in the future.

We honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for the same reasons. He’s become civically deified in death, and we’ve lost track of his more radical stances, but what shines through is peaceful, civil disobedience. That a good man, speaking up, can change the world, not by force of arms, but by being seen as a fellow human by those with the power to effect change. We all want to be that man, in our hearts, standing up for what is right. We can’t all do it for all manner of reasons, but we can aspire.

All of our holidays follow this model, or they should. Holidays are not for the dead, or our ancestors, or our forefathers; but for us, the living. We celebrate because we want to connect to that past in our own fleeting existences.

So what are we celebrating when we celebrate Christopher Columbus? And are we proud of that history? Does what he did 522 years ago, and what he represents, carry forward to today? I don’t know the answer.

On the one hand, he is venerated as an explorer. I argue his exploration was incidental to his actual goals, but, as Dave Barry once put it, Columbus wasn’t the first to arrive in the Western Hemisphere, but he was the first to hold a press conference about it in Europe.

On the other hand, he and his men did unspeakable acts of violence to the people they found here. They ushered in a period of colonial oppression and death that was unrivaled in a thousand years, and that continues to echo in our own policies today.

When you get right down to it, Columbus was a man trying to make his fortune. You can’t fault a person for that per se, but you can certainly decide whether you want to emulate his behavior.

So celebrate Columbus Day if you wish. Just know what you are celebrating. But also take a moment to realize that when you celebrate a man, you get the whole thing, genocidal warts and all.