TO BE FAIR, THESE PEOPLE SHOULD HATE THEMSELVES. I JUST WISH THEY’D LEAVE THE REST OF US OUT OF IT: Behind the monument wars is a plague of self-hatred.

What fascinates me about this civilizational auto-immune disorder is how superficial it is. More than 95 percent of the people in Puerto Rico speak Spanish. The dominant religion is Catholicism.

As far as I can tell, Mark-Viverito, who is of mixed European ancestry (her mother, Elizabeth Viverito, was of Italian descent and a prominent Puerto Rican feminist; her father, Anthony Mark, was a prominent doctor), does not speak Taino, the native language of the Arawak tribes who inhabited Puerto Rico when Columbus arrived. Rather, she speaks the languages of her alleged oppressors — Spanish and, of course, English. She even attended Columbia University.

My point is not that the world ushered in by Christopher Columbus has been very good to Mark-Viverito, though it obviously has. It’s that toppling some statues or even incanting some nonsense about “cultural appropriation” cannot separate the iconoclasts from the culture they live in.

If only we could. . . .