The Trump administration recently took a position on a man with a documented record of genocide and enslavement. “In this White House,” a spokesman announced last week, following the installation of a statue on the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, “Christopher Columbus is a hero.”
It is worth pausing on that word. A hero, in the civic sense, is not merely someone whom people admire. It is someone whose story the country agrees to tell in a particular way. Heroism is a narrative decision.
