It’s A Holiday
It’s the second Monday in October, so it is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Have a happy one.
The US Federal government has decided to call it Columbus Day, even when it isn’t on the 12th of October which was the second Wednesday in 1492. But it’s okay that the holiday can be on the wrong day, because Christopher Columbus [AKA: Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón] didn’t find what he was looking for and identified what he did find incorrectly. The important thing is that a large area of the map got changed from “here be dragons and sea serpents,” to “here be gold and cannibals” and no mention was made of the oppressive heat, mosquitoes, or hurricanes.
It’s a big day for Italians in the US, even though Colombo was Genoese, not Italian, as there was no Italy until just before the American Civil War.
But, hey, holidays are all about frauds and misconceptions in furtherance of a day off. In 1492 Isabel la Católica, Queen Regnant of Castile and Leon; Queen Consort of Aragon, Majorca, Naples and Valencia; Countess Consort of Barcelona, was more concerned to ridding her realm of non-Catholics, and had a “whatever” attitude about Cristóbal Colón. Her support amounted to a piece of paper telling people to supply him with men and ships out of their own pockets, not her treasury.
So while Chris sailed the “ocean blue”, ‘Bel and Ferd with the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada as the first Inquisitor General, pursued a policy of “religious cleansing” which provided important material for Monty Python.
We end up on a landmass named for a Florentine employee of the de Medici family, because a Freiburger [there was no Germany until 1870] cartographer read a probably bogus book of letters. OTOH, you have to give Vespucci points for figuring out that he probably wasn’t in Asia.
13 comments
Several years ago my wife and I left lake Powel on Columbus day we drove through part of the Navaho reservation. Seeing school busses loaded with kids obviously heading for school my wife wondered why they didn’t get the holiday off. I just told her that it isn’t their holiday and, likely, never would be.
Shirt
I like the Monty Python sketch, but I’m a Mel Brooks fan to the core, so I’d go with the “Inquisition” number from History of the World Part I. To each his/her own.
Happy Genocide Day, y’all!
I wonder why Italian-Americans cling so hard to Columbus Day despite the fact that Columbus wasn’t, like, American, and never even set foot in North America. C’mon, folks, you’re saying that in nearly 250 years of existence of the United States of America you can’t find even one *actual* Italian-American worthy of having a holiday? Not even *one*? So you gotta have a holiday around a guy who wasn’t even American? LAME!
Where was a Donald Trump when the Caribs needed him? If they had sent Columbus back to Spain things would be a lot different.
Well, MB, synchronized nun swimming is a bit memorable. 🙂
It is as good an excuse for a party and parade as most of our other holidays, Badtux.
Yeah yeah, I know, Cinco de Mayo for the Italian-American set, just an excuse to have parades and wave a foreign flag and drink a lot of beer. But couldn’t they have, like, chosen someone who was American to celebrate? Like maybe that dude who invented New York Style thin crust pizza? Now *that* is a guy worthy of having a holiday, why, his invention (along with coffee) fuels the entire computer industry!
Columbus had the most and best PR, i.e. everyone knew and accepted the distortions about what he did.
After him, Al Capone & Lucky Luciano were the best known Italian=Americans, which is not something they like to be pointed out.
We should celebrate Lombardi Day. The heathen can believe that it’s about Vince Lombardi, the great football coach, but us in the know really will know it’s about Gennaro Lombardi, a far more important person in the history of computers. 🙂
— Badtux the Pizza-lovin’ Penguin
Actually I did my best work with burritos from El Indio in San Diego, but I could live with celebrating Lombardi’s..
Whatever else it was, it must have been a bank holiday, because my monthly SocSec payment is now a day later than it’s ever been. Either that, or some bankers and Republicans got out of their cages…
It is a bank holiday and if you were born from the 1st to the 15th, today is the latest the second Wednesday, SS payday, can be.
… and indeed it arrived today. Tnx for the info. I can tell I won’t be able to live on that amount, esp. as the feral gummint just announced no increase in SocSec payments in 2016. Their excuse is declining oil prices, and of course we cranky old farts use soooo much gas…
Maybe they could use Marconi as the token Italian. He was Italian, spent a lot of time in America, was famous and infamous, and almost made something very useful actually work, depending on whose account you believe. (I have my doubts. But hey, why not; he came as close as any of the others who were vying for the patents… my personal analogy is the $70 indoor broadcast TV antenna Stella was suckered into buying for her fancy DTV; that antenna also sometimes comes close to working once in a while.)
BTW, I have firsthand evidence in the person of an old girlfriend who is Colombian-American that Colombians (in particular, her parents, both now naturalized American citizens, and the girlfriend was born in NYC) rarely if ever think about Columbus. That’s OK, of course; I never think about Amerigo Vespucci…
They have a CPI-E, a consumer price index specifically for seniors, but they won’t use it. The price of gasoline for someone who puts less than 2,000 miles per year is rather irrelevant.