Happy Colonial Parasite Day!

Today we honor Columbus Day by … having parent-teacher conferences? I guess that’s what happens when our memories get sick and start to die … they switch from being “Celebrated!” to just (Observed). And Columbus has certainly been getting sick lately, hasn’t he? Boy, it sure would be great if we could blame him for personally killing all of the Native Americans. You know, make it all his fault and then sweep him and his precious little holiday under the rug? I guess that’s the nice thing about rugged individualism and the American ideal: when we’ve decided we don’t like our heroes anymore, we can just forget about them and they disappear.

We like leaders who will take us into uncharted territory, give us new ideas and move us forward as a culture. Locate a new continent and we will name dozens of cities after you, including our capitol district. You will be applauded, added to the history books, and on one day each year, all of the 2nd graders in the country will chant in unison,

“In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue!”

And then, when these same kids get to high school, they’ll learn about smallpox, and genocide, and slavery, and war, and suburbs, and nuclear waste, and capitalism, and theocracy. No catchy mnemonics for those, are there?

Oh, but our brains do enjoy putting things in boxes, and sometimes we think it would be easier to put all of these things in the Columbus box. I sure do — I wish I had more friends who could tell me stories about their ancestors, and the ancestors of those ancestors, who live inside the trees and stars. I wish Christianity and Democracy and Science had all learned a little something from the Chippewa and the Cherokee before their civilizations got mowed over like the buffalo and the Carolina parakeet.

I’d like to blame all of this on Columbus, but I can’t, because all he was doing was exhibiting “emergent behavior.” He was an ant in search of food, and when he found it, the other ants followed. Instead of a chemical trail, he made a map. He was a bee, doing a dance for the queen to indicate the direction of pollen from the Nicotiana plant, come on guys, follow me, I know the way, you’re gonna love this stuff.

We do love our heroes. We created Superman, and Washington, and Indiana Jones. We turned Jesus into a rock star, and he now has some of the biggest stages the world has ever seen. And we will turn on him too, someday. He’ll be replaced, or displaced, or just ignored and lost. The Bible will be overlooked in a glut of etexts and podcasts. Many people will regret this, but this is simply the price of individualism. If you let one person carry around all of your favorite ideas for you, and that person is forgotten, where do the ideas go? No, not in a book, nor in music, nor a painting, nor a building. The ideas have to live inside the people, and more than that, they have to be communicated. It doesn’t matter how, really: to each his own. But the information has to travel, and it has to be free, and some of the information is going to be helpful, and some of it is going to be noise, and some of the information is going to be a virus that will infect people with really bad ideas like genocide and racism and fast-food hamburgers.

I could say something about the Internet here, how it has changed the way we communicate with each other and that now we have this great way to tell people our stories and keep the information flowing. I am hopeful, but I also know that reading blogs is no different than reading letters from your friends, and when you’re reading letters from your friends, it’s really easy to ignore what your next-door neighbor is screaming at you, namely please turn down that music, I don’t want to hear that shit while I’m trying to read, and why do you keep parking your car in my flowerbed, and would you please keep your dog from crapping on the sidewalk? Yes, the Internet can bring people together, but it also has the power to splinter people apart into self-centered islands of fame and shared loneliness, cushioning us from the stress of interacting with people whose ideas we don’t share. And in a society where everybody’s a consumer, and everybody’s got something to sell, the commercial possibilities of the Internet are still as wide open as the Atlantic. The asocial nerds that were so cute while they were making computers out of their garages grew up to become billionaire megalomaniacs, and old Cristobal had nothing on the explorers at Google and their hotlinked maps to your buried and not-so-buried informational treasures.

Perhaps Columbus was the very first cowboy. And our president is a different, more recent cowboy. Do we blame everything on him? Or do we blame the hive? Because as stupid as he sounds sometimes, I’m pretty sure that when little Georgie was in the second grade, he was chanting about Oceans Blue just like everybody else. Clearly he missed the lesson on not starting wars with people just because you’re feeling insecure, but that’s only because No Child Left Behind hadn’t been invented yet, right? Bush isn’t a blog that we can blissfully ignore by distracting ourselves with IKEA porn and comedic rants. He is from us and of us, just like Columbus. So let’s remember, nay, celebrate, that hateful sonofabitch Columbus, because he might just be able to tell us something about who we are now, and what happens next.