Hey Everybody,

It is that time again. Sorry it is a little late this month, I was wanting to get it out on Columbus Day - but I came up short - so I am sending it a day or so after.

The tour with Paul was fantastic.I got back in the late September and am just getting acclimated.

If you bought one of the advance copies of our new CD “This is not You” and have not received it - please respond to this newsletter.

I am looking at going out to the east coast this spring - if you would like us to come to your town please let me know.

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Finally, I am not doing very many live shows in the imeadiate future but I am bringing back new season of my weekly series: "The Poem of the Week". Here is episode 1.

https://youtu.be/A0ZkzUoBAcU?si=rHqYc6xNzx6t3bAl

ENOUGH of the Crass Commercial Announcements.

Here is your

M.U.S.E. .A.N.D. .W.H.I.R.L.E.D. .R.E.T.O.R.T.

Revisiting Columbus Day

Most of us know this date from, a folk song, or a children’s nursery rhyme.It is, at least in my view, the date at which modern history begins.

Everything changes.

Whether you prescribe that Columbus discovered America, or that the Taino discovered a European sailor lost at sea,

everything changes on October 12, 1492.

I try not to quibble with the word discover because I believe I discovered a new shelfunderneath the sink in the bathroomof my new apartment.

But I digress.

I want to back up a little bit

because the world was already

getting smaller, rapidly.

Constantinople had recently changed its name

to Istanbul thus severing the silk road.

A new route to India and China had to be found.

The universe is a cosmic paradox: both expanding and contracting at the same time.

It got small quickly.It simply had to suddenly expand.

The Portuguese had a head startwith the exploration and exploitation of Africaas they rounded her hornto find a route to India in search of sugar.They were already using African slavesto grow it on the recently conqueredCanary Islands.

Spain had to find another way.

And they did.

We all know the story.

The event itself - for better or worse (or both) - DID inalterably change the world for everyone on it.Everyone who has lived breathed and diedever since has changed.

One can quibble with the word “discover,” but not that Europeans landing in the Bahamas on October, 12 is one of the seminal events in human history.

It changes everything, and everybody.

The universe is a cosmic paradox: both expanding and contracting at the same time.

The date is important.

In truth, if it hadn’t been himit would have been someone else -with largely the same outcome,which is why I don’t like vilifying himspecifically.

As for the man,and why he is so enormously celebrated in the USA?

He is not.

It is a myth that is celebrated,an icon.

Albeit a false icon. A false idol.

A false American idol.

During the American revolution,what would later become the United Statesneeded a non British hero to rally behindand Columbus was plucked from obscurity, Itis the reason our capital is in the District of Columbia.

Later, around the the 400th anniversary - In 1892 -(coincidentally following a wave of Italian immigration,)his popularity soared.

Suddenly Columbus was everywhere,

The Colombian Exchange, cities, towns, streets, Columbia University, even the country of Columbiawas named around then.

But the origin of that popularity too,has been dropped from history.

In the late 1800s Italian Americans began fleeing economic hardships and began migrating to the US primarily to New York and New Orleans.

In Louisiana their rapid rise to prosperity promptedan ICE style round up of Italianswhich led to a mass retaliatory lynchingof the most prominent Italianseven after a jury found them all innocent.

It ranks as one of the largest mass lynchings in US history.

There was world-wide condemnation.

Italy pulled it’s ambassadors from the country and threatened to put battleships at the mouth of the Mississippi. To appease the Italians President Benjamin Harrison paid some reparations to the families of the victims and told them that he would give the Italians their own special day. We would call it Columbus Day. Columbus - the most famous Italian.

A monument was erected in NYC and named it Columbus Circle. New York still has the largest Columbus Day parade in the world. Columbus Day was largely only celebrated there for the next 40 some odd years.

In the 1920s, the Klan’s anti-Catholic paranoiaabout a protestant genocideperformed by the Catholicswas ramping up and continuing into the ‘30s.

Alarmed, the Knights of Columbus - a fraternal Catholic Charity - began producing books honoring immigrant Catholics and included Columbus.

He became a symbol if immigration.

In an attempt to strengthen his very broad Democratic Coalition to include immigrants, FDR created Columbus Day.

However, the problem is lionizing a manmakes his fall from graceall the moreuncomfortable for those involved.

The higher you rise, the harder you splat.

For years, much of what followedthe Europeans figuring outthat there was an entire “New” worldhas been - and still is - left from history text books.

I know I did not learn any of it in school.

It wasn’t until the civil rights era of the 1960sthat most Americans began to listen to indigenous people and history books began to be rewritten.

The sins of colonization, the indigenousand African slave trade,disease, power shifts, land grabs, cultural upheavalhad been conveniently omittedcreating a sugar coated narrative.

The study of historyis for the purpose of learning fromthe way earlier people behavedand in order to learn that you must be honest.

You can not blamethe brutal colonization of the “New” world on Columbus.

He was sent by a countrythat was just concluding the Inquisition.Also in 1492 The Ottoman Sultan saved 800,000Spanish Jews from that inquisition. What did one expect to happen:the largest empire the world has ever known,pretty much dedicated the next three centuriesto enslaving all non Christiansto extract all of its resourcesfor its own enrichment.

When they killed all of the native people on the islands they began importing Africans to pick up the slack.

I think I miss-spoke a few minutes ago when I said the narrative had been sugar coated. It should be sugar coatedand with a silver lining.

The average life expectancy of a slaveon a sugar plantation was about five years. Indigenous slaves died by the thousandsin the Spanish silver mines.

You can’t blame all of that on one man.

But, you can blame it on human kind.

The world was - and still is - a very brutal place.

What is US America’s part in it? Comparatively small when you look at the Spanish, French, British and Dutch.

 

What is Columbus’ role in it?Even smaller. Like almost all Europeans of his day when viewed by today’s standards Columbus was a real SOB.

Columbus Day has almost nothing to do with him.

So the name should simply be changed.

It is arguably the most significant date in human history. Perhaps not the best one to honor immigrants.

America’s first immigrants - the Spanish - were in the words of our president, “Some very band hombres.”

I find it ironic that President Trumpis simultaneously rounding up Hispanicswith masked armed menwhile honoring the very manthat led them here in the first place.

Talk about illegal immigration.

The very ones that support mass deportationalso want to bring back a holidaywhose origin is as a remembrance of immigrants.

That said,The date is important. It is the date the entire world becameboth larger and smaller.

Making up stories deifying and vilifying one man makes the world more divided.

Let me leave you with this question: Who do you admire more Cortez or Montezuma?

The universe’s cosmic paradoxof expanding and contracting at the same timeis something it simply must do.

But when it divideswe are truly screwed.

Hell, I bet you came from the wrong side of the very first cell division.