CHRISDAY CONFLICT
I have decided it had something to do with the fact that we are in an election year. This was the first time I remember hearing some edge-of-nasty arguments about who discovered America and when.
Most of us, I think, are willing to give Christopher Columbus the credit or the blame for having brought the existence of the American continents to the attention of a curious and gold-seeking throng of Europeans. Chris, himself, was intent on finding a passageway to China, India other such places. Never before do I recall so much comment as in the week of our recent “Columbus Day”celebrations. Those who favored all that we had been taught about Columbus had to put up with a veritable flood of guff from those who contended that America was discovered, at least a good five centuries ahead of Christopher Columbus' numerous trips across the Briney. They claimed Leif Erickson, or, maybe, Eric the Red, or just another shield-studded gang of generously blond-bearded Vikings with bull horns glued to their headgear, had came upon both hunks of western real estate in their wanderings. Some even went so far as to suggest, that which is probably true; that Old Chris died not knowing, for sure, exactly what he had found.
Even callers on the radio talk shows were hot to hate that week and it had to stem from the critical stance we all seem to have adopted toward the finals weeks of our election process.
The Columbus-was-late-crowd argument seemed to be enhanced by ignorance of the facts, intensified by confusion and worse this year because of the voting booth jitters so many of us are apparently susceptible to at this time of the quad-year civic cycle. He slightest bit of disagreement - conflict!
Columbus went back to Spain and talked to interested, concerned people about the new land. He even wrote a book about it , some insist, but the Norse left their sparsely sustained settlements on the slightest setback - such as bad weather - to return to their former camp sites in Greenland and Iceland. It is true they were centuries ahead of others - Spanish, Portuguese, English - but the Norse settlements have been vastly over-extended, romanticized and over-rated. It is likley they did build at least two rock houses - a second one when they had a spat over who was going to live in the one old Leif had left for them to use. The first to make a settlement effort was Leif Erickson and his red-headed son Eric tried it a few years later.
We have confined Columbus to the southern seas, even though he made at least one trip to Iceland and through that out-of-Ireland over-supply of imaginary islands which never existed which give Ireland a “Me, too!” position in the “who-found-America com petition. The fabled feats of various Vikings have
been dragged all over the map of the eastern half of the United States. Alleged Norse droppings has been found at a vast number of sites by overly-eager “histerians” who seem to think that any pile of rock means that “Vikings” had a colony there.
To complicate it all a bit more, a couple with Eric the Red's bunch had a boy-child child they named “Snorrie” who was born five centuries ahead of “Virginia Dare” down Roanoke Island way. Then, worse yet: November is almost upon us which brings back the well-worn - “when and where was the first Thanksgiving Day dinner consumed?” Usually the contending Commonwealths of Massachusetts and Virginia are the only ones who get excited about it.
By that time, our election ought to be over - perhaps.
A.L.M. October 27, 2004 [c619wds]
