Faux Columbus Day
[
Written Monday, October 8th, also Thanksgiving Day in Canada]
Yo, Christophero, today's yer day. Okay, not really, but um, like we gotta buy stuff, and when we celebrate your accomplishments on a Monday then people have a whole two days of the weekend to get a running start for the Wal-Mart. I always remembered your day being the Twelfth, since my mother was born on the that day, but as you've both moved on to either a newer or older world, it probably doesn't make a whit of difference. But for the record, I don't like the idea of commercial interests shifting the date. Same for my oldest younger sister Julia, who was born on February 22nd, which back then was still Washington's Birthday. Now not only is the birthday of the founder of our country not celebrated on the date of his birth any more, but it's been ganged up with Lincoln's birthday, renamed Presidents' Day, and the mattresses and SUVs and VCRs are flyin' out the doors.
I know that Ole Chris has lost some of his shine, what with his slaughtering Indians and stuff. And a lotta folks think he falsely upstaged the Vikings, while others rue that he was himself upstaged by Amerigo Vespucci, name-wise. Fol and de-rol, the undisputed fact is that he sailed to the Western Hemisphere when most people didn't have a notion that it even existed. I would put that at the top of my Columbus list.
Not that I feel it's right to slaughter indigenous people simply because you have guns and they don't. Father Junipero Serra was allegedly responsible for enslaving, brutalizing, and killing thousands of locals who did him no harm. Many, especially in the Bay Area, died inadvertently from imported European maladies. The truth is that white people didn't think of non-whites as real people back then; like how the Taliban feel about women. Nowadays, killing of locals is frowned upon, unless it's in your own best interest and you can hide behind a political firewall. Ask Kissinger, who got the Nobel Prize for his roll in the deaths of 3,000,000 Vietnamese, 100,000 Iranian Kurds, thousands of Chileans, countless Laotians, and untold millions of Cambodians.
Back to our founder — and until they revoke the "fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two guess who sailed the ocean blue" poem — I'm saying it was Columbus. There is about him walking through the streets of Madrid. He hears some ne'er-do-wells sitting on a stoop, saying as he goes by, Well, sure, like anyone cudda done what he did. Columbus stops. Looks at the three men, and asks them if they can make an egg stand up. They try and try and try, but can't. Columbus says I can. They scoff. He takes the egg, and hits it hard enough to smush one end. There it stood. Oh, howled the street-sleepers, I cudda done that. Ah, said Columbus, but you didn't.
Thank you, sir, for your courage and determination. You truly represent the American why-not/can-do spirit that is the hallmark of all achievement. On behalf of that spirit, I hope that we regain our footing, our integrity, and our purpose to further your achievement with our own.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.