Ciao Colombo

In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue...

And the rest, as they say, is history.  A history, however, that has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and has been reinterpreted by many in a less than favorable light.  Not that there isn't adequate room for a reassessment of the blind adulation that was proffered in my youth, Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, flat world, over the edge, sea monsters, and all the regalia of myth.  From the perspective of the First Peoples, I can understand how "Columbus Invades America" is not exactly a headline that makes you want to fire up the barbie and toss back a few tall frosties.  Sort of like celebrating the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Twin Towers.  But then this is the year Two Thousand and Ten.

So let's take a trip with Mr. Peabody in the way-back machine, to Nineteen Hundred and and Sixty.  That's right Sherman, it's fifty years ago, and a bald ex-general named Eisenhower is in the White House, nattering on about the dangers of the military-industrial complex (indeed it was he who coined the term).  Ironic that a military man who led the might of battleship America against the evil that was fascism, a Republican to boot, should have raised the frightening specter of the nexus between corporate money and foreign policy, but there it is.  Still, I digress.  We were in the waning days of a presidential campaign between the sitting Vice-president (before he became Tricky) and an upstart Senator from Massachusetts (before he became Camelot).

And I would have been in third grade, Mrs. Carney's class, at Tatnuck Elementary in Worcester, Massachusetts (which should give you a good idea of my cheering interests in the presidential campaign).  Public school.   Those were the days when, after the pledge of allegiance was still pledged every morning with the "under god" prominently displayed (actually under god was only added on June 14, 1954, as blow back against those godless commies), Mrs. Carney would read to us from the Bible (the King James Version, as it turns out, as she explained to me after I was particularly moved by her reading of the Twenty-third Psalm).  Yessir, god and country and Columbus, nearly as big a hero as the Pilgirms, good anglo-saxon stock who happened to land in my state which made them eminently cooler than a bunch of ex-cons under an Italian captain bankrolled by a Spanish queen, but, yet again, I digress.

My point is, if I have to have one, is that not everybody figured the world was flat, even in 1492.  Although there are outliers who still cleave to this theory (and others who believe dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time as man, but that's another story), Eratosthenes, a Cyrene living in Ptolemaic Egypt, not only understood the world was round, but in 240 BCE calculated the circumference within a 1% error.  Columbus had trouble in Italy raising money for his maritime adventurism, because the Pope had his own problems.  So, he convinced Queen Isabella of Spain, who was feeling flush having just reunited her country, and expelled both the Muslims and the Jews, to pony up the cash for a classic money grab, looking to shortcut the sea route to the spice islands of the Indies.  What the hell: three ships and some token crews; not too bad a bet against a lifetime supply of cinnamon and cardamom.

And Columbus, clear on the round earth notion, but a little off on his estimate of the circumference (should of talked to Eratosthenes, but he'd already been dead for seventeen hundred years) ran smack into the new world.  He of course didn't know it was a new world.  And the First Peoples who he found here (found, not discovered - they knew they were here, but weren't so clear about where he came from), had not been adequately apprised of all the benefits about to be bestowed upon them (forced conversion and disease come readily to mind) or they might've helped him across the Central American isthmus (how in the hell did Amerigo Vespucci get his name on two continents, and Columbus gets DC?) and hurried him on his way towards China.

Anyhow the point is Columbus got it wrong, but ended up being a hero.  Then still a hero, but not so much.  And then not a hero at all to some, but still a hero to others.  Fifty years ago we had an entirely different (and less nuanced) view of the man and his accomplishments.  We also had different views about school prayer, racism, sexism, space flight, and the odds on the Boston Red Sox ever winning another World Series (finally happened in 2004 for those of you keeping score at home).  When I was a kid I idolized the Lone Ranger, who had his own very ambiguous relationship with the First Peoples.  Didn't make me a bad kid, or the Lone Ranger a bad man.  We were products of our times, as Columbus was of his.

Which makes any judgements we render today subject to review and revision.  We pays our nickel and takes our chances.  Even W could end up a hero in somebody else's story.