Special Monday Rant - 10/12/15

A special Monday rant?!?! What is happening? I know, but today always makes me cranky. Christopher Columbus was a dick, and this holiday is bullshit. In case you don't know why, I'm here to spread the hate.

Columbus. Dude, you can't "discover" a place where people have been living for 12,000 years! First of all, this bitch didn't set foot on American soil. Columbus crashed in to the Bahamas somewhere. But even so, millions of native people had already built great civilizations, so he didn't discover SHIT. Just because Columbus didn't know that there was a continent between him and India doesn't make him a discoverer, it makes him bad at research, because the Vikings had already been fishing all over Canada for 300 years.

Also, no one thought the world was flat. People didn't think that in 1492. In fact, anyone with two brain cells to rub together hasn't thought that since the 3rd century. Columbus wasn't sailing around the world on a scientific mission, he was going to India to find treasure, and he was going to split the money with the Queen of Spain. Instead of gold and spices he found something even more profitable: people. Which brings me to the biggest reason Columbus Day is bullshit...

This asshole opened the Atlantic slave trade. It's like this: say you're driving, and you just pulled in to the wrong town. You're totally lost. But the nice folks there offered you directions, a cup of coffee and a nice slice of pie. You notice they aren't immediately pointing weapons at you. What do you do? If you're Christopher Columbus and his band of Merry Assholes, you hunt the town for sport, beating, torturing, raping, and killing the population, and then feed their bodies to your hunting dogs. And if you left anyone alive, you put them on a ship and sent them to Seville, where they are paraded naked through the streets and sold as slaves. Except it's not a town, it's a population of 300,000 native people and Columbus murdered or enslaved about a third of them within four years, before he was taken back to Spain in freaking shackles for being a total piece of human garbage.

And, to paraphrase Louis CK, Columbus was confused enough to call them Indians, and we STILL CALL THEM THAT. What in the actual fuck, America!?!?! And now we give this dickhead a holiday? Let's all agree that this is dumb, and that while it wasn't OK to beat up Italian immigrants in the early 20th century, a holiday based on historic lies wasn't really the best way to to stop that from happening. If you don't want to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day (which you should, asshole), here are some other great Italians who have much lower body counts: Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Al Capone.