Catch the cryptic series of digits on the side of the Santa Maria? The same strange numbers that won the lottery for Harley on ABC's hit TV show, "Lost," and perhaps altered the navigating coordinates for another of history's most-lost individuals: Christopher Columbus, whose holiday we celebrate today.
Some malign the day as the first shot in what would become the greatest genocide in the history of the planet.
Others revere the man after whom dozens of American cities, towns, squares, and one Transcontinental Highway (a.k.a. the 10 Freeway leading from Santa Monica, California to Jacksonville, Florida) are named.
Either way you see it, you can't deny that the continental ethnic cleansing that followed Columbus' arrival in the New World would be the injury added to the original insult of misidentification of the indigenous people as "Indians" by the explorer who thought he'd landed half a world away from where he actually was. Of course, those white Europeans who followed the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria embraced the malaprop. [Maybe it's what some would call "bleeding heart liberal" of me, perhaps simple pedantry (I like to think it's a simple desire for truth) but I'm not even sold on the updated term "Native American." No one on the North American continent before the Europeans arrived knew who the hell Amerigo Vespucci was; why should their culture(s) be named after him?]
Cartographer, Vespucci, America's First Top Chef?
Let's for a moment give Columbus the benefit of the doubt. The climate of Bermuda is similar to that of India, and the inhabitants of both locations often have dark skin. But weren't there other clues that he was not at his intended destination? Language, for example? Or the fact that nothing matched up with anyone's descriptions of India? How about the fact that none of the local restaurants made a decent samosa? Whatever the reason, here stood Christopher Columbus, hemispherically challenged, to be kind, sticking a Portuguese flag in the sand, calling everything by the wrong name, and earning an eventual three-day weekend for millions of American taxpayers. (the percentage of whom are of Portuguese descent is too small to find in fifteen minutes searching the internet).
Columbus was lost -- again, he was fully half-way around the world from where he wanted to be. If you look at a globe, you'll see that the only way for Columbus to be farther away from where he thought he was, he would have had to have gotten into a space ship and left the surface of the planet. If Columbus had been any more lost, he'd have fought Sawyer and made out with Jack.
So happy Columbus Day. It's back to work tomorrow, but don't worry if you get lost on the way there, wind up in the wrong office, call everyone by the wrong name and initiate the demise of those who predated your arrival. If all goes as it should, you'll get a holiday, not to mention cities, squares and maybe a transcontinental highway named for you.
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