In fourteen hundred ninety two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue…
He sailed and sailed and sailed and sailed
To find this land for me and you…
I remember singing that in the first grade as our teacher told us why we were going to have a day off from school. Columbus Day. A celebration actually lobbied for and received by the Knights of Columbus in 1892, 400 years after Columbus’s arrival in the New World and, thenafter, celebrated by New York Italians with a politically active parade ending (or starting… I forget) at Columbus Circle.
I expect that our candidates for the Presidency, hoping to shore up the Italian vote, will be there. The Log Cabin Republicans, who are supporting Giuliani, will probably be kept out of the parade by the Archbishop (they’re gay you know… they get shut out of St. Patrick’s day, why not Columbus Day?)
This is, of course, a holiday most businesses ignore, except for automobile dealers who take it as an excuse to blast us with television ads for at least a week.
Here we have no holidays celebrating Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, no holiday for the Norsemen who apparently found the New World a century previous, but neglected to bring disease, soldiers, and the spirit of Christian Conquest with them. We have no holiday for FDR who got us out of the Depression or Smithson, an Englishman who never came to our shores but endowed the greatest museum in our country to educate our children. And, of course, we have no holiday for any of the great inventors who gave us the world as it now exists: Edison or Morse or whoever it was who invented the TV Dinner.
I’m celebrating the day by correcting mid-term papers from my photography class at Hagerstown Community College (which did not close for the holiday).
And it goes on.
