Sailing the Ocean Blue

Sailing the Ocean Blue
by Mitch Frank

I tried to convince the editors of The American Partisan to give me the week off for Columbus Day. After all, it’s a major American holiday. They weren’t having any.

“Listen Mitch, we like you despite the fact your columns read like something an epileptic chimpanzee wrote while trying to commit suicide, but there is no way we’re giving you Columbus Day off just because the Post Office gets it off. Come on. We’re already giving you all of Ramadan off and you’re not even Moslem.”

When you get right down to it, it doesn’t matter if they give me Columbus Day off. They haven’t realized yet that I actually farm this column out to a factory full of third-world children in Indonesia. The kids are starting to really grasp American politics thanks to this job, not to mention they get a chicken a week and all the Britney Spears they can stand.

But even though I kid about taking Columbus Day, it’s an important holiday. After all, if it wasn’t for Columbus discovering America, none of us would live here. Sure, that would make all the Native Americans really happy, but our noble experiment in American democracy would never have taken place. We’d all be living in our various ancestral nations, and there would be no American melting pot. There would be no Mark Twain, no infield fly rule and no Jerry Springer.

Somewhere, right now, there’s a Native American crying.

Now, I know quite a few of you are saying Columbus’ discovering America was not truly important. Someone would have discovered America. I mean, come on! North and South America – two pretty big continents – were just lying over the horizon from Europe and Asia. You couldn’t sail far without sooner or later running into them. Just like you can’t drive 50 miles in America without going by a Waffle House or a Stuckeys or one of those annoying South of the Border billboards.

And all of that is true. The Vikings even discovered America 400 years earlier. But they didn’t stay. They looked around Newfoundland, realized there was no alcohol and no villages to burn, and quickly headed back to Scandinavia, stopping off to burn London.

And quite a few Native Americans would probably like to point out they had discovered America quite awhile before the Vikings and Columbus and were already engaged in amazing activities such as inventing the number zero and coming up with many tasty uses for Buffalo meat.

But Columbus had the fortune to discover America at a time when Europe was looking for it. Oh sure, Columbus was looking for India, not America, a fact that makes him look like the dumbest explorer to ever get his hands on a boat. It also makes Ferdinand and Isabella pretty stupid for giving him three boats. But hey, all of Europe was stupid then. Europeans thought the world was shaped like Jerry Lewis and thought Ferdinand was a respectable name for a king.

But Columbus’ voyage is symbolic of all voyages to America in many ways. Think about it.

Columbus wanted to sail across the Atlantic because of an idea. He thought India and the spice trade could be reached by way of the Atlantic. His naïve belief in his idea was no different from America’s naïve belief that the people could rule themselves without a king or lords, no different from America’s naïve belief that Keanu Reeves could get a bus to jump a 100 foot span between highway overpasses, no different from America’s naïve belief that Keanu Reeves can act.

Columbus also had American chutzpah and salesmanship. After all, he convinced two of Europe’s most powerful rulers that some Italian guy who thought the world was round should be given three ships and as many sailors as he wanted. But Chris, Ferdie, and Isa all shared one other American attribute – greed. If Columbus could find a quick and easy way to the Far East, they would all make a bundle.

Columbus’ crew was ready to leave the Old World for a new one. Research has suggested that most of the crew members of the three ships (the Nina, the Pinta, and the AMC Gremlin) were actually Jewish. The Inquisition was raging in Spain, and those Jewish sailors were desperate to go someplace else, even if it meant following some crazy Italian off the edge of the Earth.

In fact, some Italian scholars have suggested Columbus’ family history implies that he was Jewish. Future immigrants would flock to America because they could practice their religion freely there, a precedent set on that historical trip to the New World.

And that illustrates what was so symbolic of Chris’ great adventure – America has always represented a land for dreamers. That dream might be the freedom to practice your religion without packs of Cossacks riding through with swords every three weeks. That dream might be the freedom to rise out of poverty and make as much money as Bill Gates’ plumber does. That dream might be to become president of the United States, despite the fact your dad did a bad job as president and you spent the ‘80s drunk in Texas.

Whatever your dream is, you can realize it in America. Sometimes you have to fight for it, but you can achieve it. And all of those dreams stem from one dream – That all men are created equal.

Even ones named Ferdie.

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