Tag Archives: Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus: hero or villain?

Every year on Columbus Day we always have to hear stories about “the real” Christopher Columbus, about how he was a total jerk. Yes, he sailed to the new world and, yes, apparently he killed a lot of natives. But that was so long ago, and the history is always evolving. Isn’t it a little shortsighted of us to close the book on Columbus? Maybe he wasn’t the evil villain character so popular with modern historians. Maybe he was a hero.

I’m just saying, what if Columbus sailed to America, and he found the population enslaved by a race of evil aliens? I wasn’t around back then, so I can only rely on my imagination here, but could there have been? Can you definitely say that the new continent wasn’t overrun by alien warlords?

If it was, and just hear me out here, if Christopher Columbus sailed all the way to America, only to find the local inhabitants hopelessly enslaved by a group of otherworldly terrorists, and, lets say that Columbus wasn’t a dick, but was actually a pretty good guy, wouldn’t it make sense that he would totally try to help the American Indians rid themselves of their spacefaring captors?

Sure, we think that the Europeans were a lot more technologically advanced than the peoples of North America. But compared to an alien civilization capable of interplanetary conquest, the explorers must have looked downright primitive. So you can imagine the uphill battle Columbus would have faced in taking on a whole fleet of extraterrestrials, if they were actually there, and if Columbus wasn’t a total jerk.

The ensuing battle would have been a massacre, with tons of casualties on both sides. But what if Columbus and his men were somehow successful? What if they fought bravely enough to drive the aliens back from where came? Columbus and his men would be surrounded by the wreckage of an alien war, dead bodies piled up around them. With the aliens now gone, who would believe their story?

Nobody, and that’s why we’re all blaming it on Columbus. And if the aliens are still out there, don’t you think they’re constantly beaming down misinformation about how the events actually went down? I bet you they’re weaseling their way onto the Internet this very second, spreading lies about how it was Columbus and his men who butchered the Indians.

It’s just a theory, obviously, and a working theory at that. I’m always thinking up new possibilities for how the aliens got here in the first place, what their plans were after they finished conquering the Americas, and how, if any of this is true, the European explorers actually saved the whole planet. But yeah, I don’t have a lot of facts.

But still, the next time you hear someone talking about how Columbus was an asshole, about how he and his men butchered and maimed and raped everyone they came in contact with, just ask yourself, are you sure it wasn’t aliens? Are you really sure? Are positive? Can you prove it wasn’t? No? So stop being so judgmental. Just enjoy your day off. Happy Christopher Columbus Day.

Happy Columbus Day!

Can we please give some credit where credit is due? I’m talking Christopher Columbus, the man who discovered America. Everybody knows the story, they taught it to as schoolchildren. In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And he found America. Nobody else had the guts to go out there and find America. Everyone was too afraid that they’d fall off the face of the flat Earth.

Again, this is all rudimentary American history, I’m not going to go through the whole tried and true “it really happened” story. Because it did happen. And why do I even have to mention that, that it really happened? Because every year, Columbus Day rolls around, and you see a bunch of stuff on the Internet, like “Columbus was an asshole!” or “He didn’t really discover America!”

Or my favorite, “People didn’t really think the earth was flat!” to which I say, oh yeah? If the ancient Greeks knew that the earth was round, how come they didn’t send any ships over to find America? Because they didn’t know the earth was round, and they didn’t know America even existed. That’s why Alexander the Great’s empire collapsed. That’s why Xerxes won at the end of 300. And that’s why The New Adventures of Hercules and Eolis wasn’t renewed for a seventh season.

“Oh but what about the Vikings! What about Newfoundland!” Listen, has anybody ever been to Newfoundland? Because I haven’t. And if you’re thinking it’s a little solipsistic of me to write off a place as nonexistent just because I haven’t been there, I’d like to offer this: none of my friends have ever been to Newfoundland. Have you? Seriously, have you? Because I’ve had friends and family members visit a lot of places, Japan, Africa, even Toronto. So yeah, I can say with some confidence that I’m pretty sure they’re all real. But Newfoundland? Vikings?

I’m not even sure that the Vikings ever existed. But I’m getting off topic. Let’s just say for argument’s sake that Newfoundland does exist. Couldn’t these so-called Vikings have simply crossed the frozen North Pole, straight up from Scandinavia, and then ventured down south to Canada? So even if Newfoundland does exist, it’s not like these bearded adventurers had to cross any oceans or anything. No, because they wouldn’t have, because everybody that was born before Columbus proved that the world is round simply took it as a matter of fact that the planet Earth was flat.

“It doesn’t matter at all,” the naysayers complain every year, “because Columbus was a jerk, he butchered the indigenous population, he would chop off the limbs of little children to test out the sharpness of his blades, he demanded tributes of gold from everyone under his rule and mutilated anybody that failed to meet the quota,” blah, blah, blah.

No way. I remember watching this video in the first grade, it was the complete story of Christopher Columbus, it was a cartoon, how he convinced the Queen of Spain that the earth was round, how he led those three ships across an unprecedented transatlantic voyage. When he finally reached dry land, I distinctly remember him marching to the shore, meeting a group of curious Indians and saying, “Hello! My name is Christopher Columbus! I come in peace!”

Why would they teach little kids something if it were so completely contrary to what actually happened? They wouldn’t do that, not in America, not in the greatest school system in the world. It wouldn’t make any sense, to take something so wildly inaccurate and then present it to little kids as historical fact. What would be the point of such needless revisionism? No, I can only assume that everyone else is lying, that instead of looking to Columbus and seeing a great man, they’re just petty, angry, jealous that they weren’t the ones that got to discover America.

Everybody loves Christopher Columbus. The people of Columbus, Ohio, they really, really love Columbus. The nation of Colombia, they love Columbus even more, they named the whole country after Columbus. That should have been our country’s name, the United States of Colombia. I can’t believe we dropped the ball on that one.

Let’s just give the guy some credit, OK? To a great man, one of the greatest, Christopher J. Columbus. I wish every day were Columbus Day.

I just thought of the greatest idea for a movie

Ever since I saw the trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I’ve felt a wave of inspiration to write a bunch of other historically inspired thrillers. My first one is going to be called Calvin Coolidge: In Space. It’s going to start off at that famous White House party, the one where that woman walks up to President Coolidge and says, “My friend made a bet that I can’t get you to say more than three words,” and just as Silent Cal is about to say, “You lose,” a group of space explorers, from the future, appears out of nowhere.

“President Coolidge!” they’ll cry. And Coolidge will turn to the camera and say, “Here we go again,” and they’ll all be teleported aboard a spaceship in the future. And when they appear on the bridge of the ship, Coolidge won’t be wearing his suit and tie anymore, he’ll be wearing a spaceship captain’s uniform. And the ship will be under heavy fire. And Coolidge won’t even have to say a word, he’ll just calmly make gestures to his crew, and they’ll all understand him, and they’ll somehow destroy the enemy vessel just in the nick of time.

Then there’s going to be a flashback to a young Calvin Coolidge growing up on the moon of some distant planet even further in the future. And you’ll learn how he became a space captain, and why he got to be so quiet, and how he wound up in the past on that first spaceship, and then how he wound up even further in the past to become President. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think that Calvin Coolidge: In Space, isn’t a descriptive enough title. It’s terrible, disgusting. Nobody’s going to want to see it. They’ll think it’s stupid and boring. I’m going to call it, Calvin Coolidge: Captain Space President of the Future in the Past. There we go. Seriously, let’s do this.

And then after I’m done writing that movie, I’m going to write another movie called, Joan of Arc: Witch Doctor. Everybody knows that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, right? And everybody thinks it has something to do with religion, right? Wrong. This movie is going to tell the untold tale of Joan of Arc, where she was actually a sorceress from a parallel magic universe. Some enemy goblins escaped from her dimension to our dimension, and she has to follow them here to stop them from taking over our world. And she does it, but everyone is scared of her powers so they wind up burning her at the stake. But she’s a witch doctor, so she just let’s everybody think she’s dying up there, but she’s really just teleporting back to her own reality. So it’s like a new, happier ending for Joan of Arc. Kind of like when they killed Hitler at the end of Inglorious Basterds. Maybe if we enter another Dark Age, where all the books get burned and knowledge is banned, maybe thousands of years in the future, as society struggles to rebuild, to find out what happened before the second Dark Age, someone will come across a copy of this movie buried in a monastery somewhere and they’ll think that this is how it really happened. Just imagining that as a possibility is enough to motivate me to come up with these great ideas, nonstop.

I could think of movies all day long. Isn’t there a movie coming out called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? OK, well, how about Crime and Punishment and Robocop? Or let’s do War and Peace and Mummies. And then Law and Order and the Plague. I mean, it’s really easy. You just find existing movie titles or book titles that consist of two nouns separated by the word “and.” And then after the second noun, you make a third “and” and you just add something wacky, like Beauty and the Beast and the KKK. Boom. Can you imagine if I were actually in charge of an actual movie studio? I would’ve made millions of dollars just by writing this paragraph. Your loss Hollywood.

And I could do kids’ stuff too. Because at the same time that I’ll be producing all of these blockbusters, I’m going to be writing another movie, a children’s movie, called Christopher Columbus vs. Pinocchio. Columbus was Italian right? Perfect. In this movie, we’ll find out that Geppetto actually already had a son. And the son’s name was Christopher Columbus. But Christopher Columbus’s mom died during childbirth, and the little boy was left all alone. And he really wanted a brother so bad. But his dad was consumed by his work as a puppeteer, and didn’t have any time to go out looking for a wife or having any more kids. But then one of Columbus’s toys, Pinocchio, comes to life. And at first they are both happy. But then Pinocchio turns out to be a huge brat. He’s constantly crying and complaining to Geppetto that Columbus isn’t playing fair or isn’t sharing his toys.

“But you are a toy!” Christopher Columbus will say to his new brother. And Pinocchio will respond, “Not anymore! And now you have to share all of your stuff!” And that will be the whole movie, just the two of them the whole time engaged in nonsense sibling rivalry. We’ll market it as, “The untold story, before he discovered the New World, Christopher Columbus discovered that brotherly love conquers blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” you get it, right? Think about it. It’s going to be a Disney film and it’s going to be in CGI and it’s going to be in 3D. But there’s a twist: the theatres will be playing the movie on two screens side by side. So they’ll advertise the movie as 6D. It obviously won’t be six-dimensional, because I don’t think that string theory has been able to empirically prove the existence of extra dimensions just yet, but people are stupid and won’t really mind paying an extra four bucks for the added novelty. It’s going to be a huge success. Make it an extra eight bucks. Yes, all of them huge successes. No, you still can’t keep the glasses. And why would you want to? Seriously, what are you planning to use them at home? They only work at the theatre, not on your TV. Besides, you look like an idiot wearing them. And can you imagine how many people have worn those on their greasy heads before you? Gross.