Happy Columbus Day

“In fourteen hundred and ninety two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue”

– then landed on an island inhabited by gentle people, and killed fucking everybody to prove that the world was round, not actually flat. I have been to that island, and will never return, because there is not a moment where I don’t feel the pain and the madness, because the ground is soaked with blood, the air is angry and whips around me like a howling ghost, the rain comes down hard to wash the memory of the dead away, but they cannot leave, because the original owners of the property have yet to receive payment even after the FINAL NOTICE remains long overdue. They rage at me, for they can see I know better, that I know to not go there, not to walk over the silver coins scattered on the ground, the Monopoly money left by the crew of the Chris and the Round World Posse, an injurious insult to the body count that can never be tallied because it is too high. Too much to pay for on layaway, too much to buy secondhand, if you have to ask you can’t afford it, and nobody could, or should be able to. Talk about being in the red. It is an inestimable debt, for how is it possible to repay for genocide? Even if you gots you that phat money no limit black American Express card, there are some places you should leave home without it, because incomprehensible crimes such as these, the insane slaughter of many nations and the robbery of the earth, the wind and the fire that rightfully belongs to them, the bail is too high, accounts receivable shuts down, so it just goes into the Chapter 11 of ALL TIME, and there is no collection agency big enough to break the legs of colonialism.

Tourists pay crazy money to walk the seemingly untouched, pristine beauty of the beaches of Columbus Isle, the swimming pool blue of the ocean, the otherworldly lavender-range and unsettlingly peaceful sunset that brings on the comfortably numb nights, of limbo and sledgehammer strong rum based drinks served in pineapples and coconuts, and dancing to the music of drums made out of metal garbage cans. I wonder if they notice the mosquitoes swarming around them, trying to extract the blood owed to the unavenged and unavengable, the innocent now irretrievably dead, the prior tenants, evicted without notice, then mindlessly executed – one tiny drop at a time. The weather turns on you in a moment, driving the unwelcome visitors back into their quaint air-conditioned huts, and the electricity cuts out so you will be left in the dark with the smothering heat and the invisible infants who still cry for their mothers left hacked to pieces on the ground, coins stacked next to their dead bodies, so that when Chris brought his peeps back, they would think that they had found a land where money grew out of the ground. The King and the Queen would be so impressed. The bodies would have decomposed and melted back into the earth by the time they came back. Like a magician pulling a quarter out of your ear, rabbits out of your ass, Columbus was Chris Crossing Copperfield, pouring the blood of millions into a cone made out of newspaper, just to rip it open, and the people are all gone, all that is left is a fake bouquet of flowers and a nursery rhyme and a wack holiday that we close the post office for. It’s a three day weekend, to celebrate the misery and bloodshed from which sprung the New World, which is not much more than the Old World 2, Electric Boogaloo. Driving on a golf cart with the Chief of Columbus Isle, we stop in the inky midnight blue night, and he speaks in hushed tones about the sadness of the sea, missing the ancient people the tide would come and wetly kiss lovingly at dusk, asking constantly where her children are.

The resorts keep the economy barely afloat, and the sea tolerates them, because the island has suffered enough, so she stops short of swallowing it whole in her watery grief, she just cries and the hurricane abates her emotions for a moment, but she will never understand or forgive the betrayal of the three ships that she let ride her there from so far away. She allowed them because she had thought them brave, to take her on faith and hope, that there would be another place in the world, that there was more to the mysterious earth than they could see. If she had known what they would do, she would have swept them into her body with a mighty wave, eaten them alive, but even they perhaps didn’t know what their plans were, until they got there, they would just go with the flow. Then the flow became an unstoppable river of blood. The sea will not forgive herself, so lost in her guilt she couldn’t stop them when they went north, killing all the way, taking the land hostage, bringing slaves from other nations, the royalty of ruthlessly dismantled kingdoms carried as steerage on her wide, blue back, ships she refused to sink for the innocents on board, but sank a few anyway, for she could not contain her anger, the building of a new empire on the foundation of carnage, cruelty and unintentionally passed on diseases. She believes it is still all her fault, and she will never stop crying. The storms that cross the sky are hers, the screeching wails of injustice, for crimes unpunished and the continuing abuse of her generosity that prevails today.

If you take the day off, do so to mourn the world, what human beings have done to one another, the true original sin, not of the consumption of an apple, which was from the tree of knowledge, and if you ask me, we should have eaten a lot more – but of colonization. Not that we should have all stayed in the same place, but we didn’t have to kill everyone in order to move in. They would have made space for us. If only we had just asked nicely. Shit, if we had just asked at all, instead of assuming that we had the power to claim it for ourselves, just ’cause. Have your long weekend, just whatever you do, don’t go to a White Sale. Sheets are not that worth that much. If you do, don’t go near the water.

6 thoughts on “Happy Columbus Day

  1. God damnit, this was a real treat to read (in the way that it’s written). Thank you for posting it to your Facebook page.

    I have been thinking of this, from George Carlin, all day:

    “Now the Indians. I call them Indians because that’s what they are. They’re Indians. There’s nothing wrong with the word Indian. “First of all, it’s important to know that the word Indian does not derive from Columbus mistakenly believing he had reached ‘India.’ India was not even called by that name in 1492; it was known as Hindustan.

    More likely, the word Indian comes from Columbus’s description of the people he found here. He was an Italian, and did not speak or write very good Spanish, so in his written accounts he called the Indians, “Una gente in Dios.” A people in God. In God. In Dios. Indians. It’s a perfectly noble and respectable word.

    As far as calling them ‘Americans’ is concerned, do I even have to point out what an insult this is? —– We steal their hemisphere, kill twenty or so million of them, destroy five hundred separate cultures, herd the survivors onto the worst land we can find, and now we want to name them after ourselves? It’s appalling. Haven’t we done enough damage? Do we have to further degrade them by tagging them with the repulsive name of their conquerors?

    You know, you’d think it would be a fairly simple thing to come over to this continent, commit genocide, eliminate the forests, dam up the rivers, build our malls and massage parlors, sell our blenders and whoopee cushions, poison ourselves with chemicals, and let it go at that. But no. We have to compound the insult.”…

    I’m glad the Indians have gambling casinos now. It makes me happy that dimwitted white people are losing their rent money to the Indians. Maybe the Indians will get lucky and win their country back. Probably wouldn’t want it. Look at what we did to it.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *