All things Columbus and Columbo


Happy Ass-Hat Day!

Or, as we like to call it in America, the great country he didn't discover, Columbus Day.

This would be well and good if Chris did, indeed, sail the seas so blue in fourten-hundred-and-ninety-two to discover a new land. But if history is any indication, the guy we name parks and federal holidays after more or less stumbled upon some land he thought was something different ... and he was a supremo ass-hat. He wrote about enslaving, raping and killing hundreds, if not thousands, of people and even dismembering his own crew for insubordination. I don't remember any poems about that in elementary school, but in defense of white-washed history, it really is hard to find something that rhymes with "dismemberment."

This is all very true. You can believe me, because I read it on Facebook today.

As the story goes (and if you can't believe everything on Facebook, what can you believe?), Queen Isabella -- the real queen, not the future name of one of Kim and Kanye's next babies -- was so peeved when she found all this out, Columbus was imprisoned in 1500. Here we bitch about bad cellphone connections, but mail was really spotty between this new-fangled America and Spain back in the late 1400s.

Naturally, with all this info coming out, we have people screaming that it is an outrage and sin to name Columbus Day after, you know, Columbus. Some cities are now calling it Indigenous People Day, in honor of all the people Columbus and other Europeans killed getting from there to here. This is all done as a knee-jerk reaction for loonies to feel good about themselves, and has the same general postive effect as a gun-free zone in Chicago. The only people who will feel good about calling it Indigenous People Day are the dumb asses who came up with the name.

It pains my brain to think this is becoming -- or has already become -- a Democrat vs. Republican thing. Liberal, baby-killing loonies will say "Change the name!" and crazy gun-stroking conservatives will double down, blame it all on Obama and try to name every remaining city in America after Columbus. Italians will scream it's all about heritage, yet they still allow Fazoli fast food Italian restaurants to exist.

Then, let's face it, there is a large swath of people who don't care what the hell we call it. They'll make a holiday for Christopher Noth if it still meant they could have a day off from school or work.

Why don't we just change the name to America Day? We could celebrate with fireworks to honor our Chinese heritage. This would appease the liberals who are still upset over the way Chinese people were treated while building our railroads. And it would appease the rest of us who like loud noises and colorful lights in the sky that make us go, "Oooh!" and "Ahhhh!" Yes, it's a lot like the Fourth of July, but in this little town called America, I like to celebrate America every day.

Or better yet, we could just ease out of Columbus Day and call it Columbo Day. Cause, let's face it, Peter Falk rocks.

Happy Columbo Day!


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