Lady Columbia, Roll On!
December 6, 2010
by Kathryn Ciano
|The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
Lady Columbia, that rare female embodiment of the United States, made an appearance last week in the Washington Examiner:
Politics aside, it’s nice to see America show her feminine side!
Examiner cartoonist Nate Beeler presents Lady Columbia as a stately, elegant personification for the United States. No quivering, rickety legs on her, as we’ve come to expect from Uncle Sam!
It’s also heartening to see America’s ladylike alter ego carrying the shield of diplomacy. She is clearly more interested in solving problems through negotiation and support, rather than imposing mutually-detrimental trade sanctions.
While we see Uncle Sam an awful lot, Lady Columbia’s appearances have been infrequent of late. Here’s Wikipedia’s record of Columbia’s appearances since the 1800′s:
- Columbia University, an ivy-league university in the City of New York, which first adopted the name ‘Columbia College’ in 1784.
- The song “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean” (1843) commemorates the United States under the name Columbia.
- Columbia Records, founded in 1888, took its name from its headquarters in the District of Columbia.
- Columbia Pictures, named in 1924, uses a version of the personified Columbia (the so-called “Torch Lady”) as its logo.
- CBS‘s former legal name was the Columbia Broadcasting System, first used in 1928. The name derived from an investor, the Columbia Phonographic Manufacturing Company, owner of Columbia Records.
- The Command Module of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, the first mission to land on the Moon, was called Columbia (1969).
- The Space Shuttle Columbia, built 1975-1979, was named for the exploring ship Columbia.
- A personified Columbia appears in Uncle Sam, a graphic novel about American history (1997).
- Columbia is the name of the “air city” featured in the video game BioShock Infinite; she can be seen on a propaganda poster in the first trailer.
Welcome back to the truly free side of the press, Lady!
I like it! And don’t forget the powerful Columbia river that runs through Washington state and is the border of Washington and Oregon. She is very powerful and provides more electrical power than any other river in the USA, transportation, food, irrigation. She has been at the center of Northwest culture for hundreds of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River
If you take a close look at the cartoon, the mouse of the computer is holding up Lady Columbia’s skirt as the computer screen snickers. The commentary that the Wikileaks have left US diplomacy exposed is represented as a gendered, sexual assault, one that would not have worked with an Uncle Sam. I do not see Lady as stately and elegant but rather shocked and apprehensive. Also, the fact that our Secretary of State–in charge of US diplomacy–is female was not lost on the cartoonist.
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