They teach you a lot of bullshit in school (or at least when I was going to school back in the olden days, they did). For instance, it was gospel that Abe Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on the train ride there. Of course, that was bullshit, and while Lincoln probably revised the speech on his way to Gettysburg (I mean, it’s not like he had an iPod, so what else did he have to do), he’d actually written two drafts of it beforehand, and even changed it up on the fly while he was giving it. Another lie was the whole George Washington and the “Cherry Tree” thing, where we were told young George chopped down the tree and was so gosh darn honest, he couldn’t tell a lie. Not only is the cherry tree story bullshit (a product of Mason Locke Weems’ – author of “The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen” – imagination), but Washington was just as big a liar as any modern day politician (he lied to the Continental Congress about the conditions at Valley Forge, for instance, in order to get more money out of them, he and Ben Franklin passed off a common Prussian soldier named Von Steuben as a Baron and high-ranking military expert, he most likely knocked up one of his slaves – Venus – reneged on treaties, and ordered the eradication of Haudenosaunee men, women, children, and their villages – earning him the name Hanadagywus: Town Destroyer). To paraphrase Al Smith and Luther Dixon, George Washington wasn’t so big – he was tall, that’s just about all. Of course, the big lie we celebrate today is that of Christopher Columbus.

I was taught in school that, back in the late 1400s, everybody thought the world was flat, and if you sailed far enough away, you’d fall off the edge. Only Christopher Columbus was visionary enough to know that the world was round, and nobody would fund the poor guy’s expedition to prove it, but (being a brave visionary and all) Columbus persevered, and finally scraped up enough money for three ships filled with the only people willing to sail off the end of the Earth – prisoners.

That this load of crap was taken from a work of fiction by Washington Irving wasn’t enough to keep them from teaching it as “fact” in schools. Turns out, Pythagoras had pretty much figured out the shape of the Earth with his “Orb Theory” about 2,000 years earlier. In fact, navigation techniques back in Columbus’ time depended on the Earth being round. Columbus’ difficulty in getting money stemmed from the fact that he was a piece of shit liar, and not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. His calculation of the size of the Earth was off by about 75%, and everybody knew it.

If Columbus’ ships had been filled with prisoners (which they actually weren’t; they were filled with experienced sailors), it would most likely have been because criminals were Chris’ kinds of people. After arriving in the “new world,” and being greeted with kindness and hospitality, Columbus and his pals sailed from island to island, taking slaves, raping the women, and killing the men (and the women; hell, they probably raped the men, too). The big problem seemed to be that these damn savages were holding out on the gold. Well, that, and this was apparently Columbus’ way of spreading Christianity (being the equivalent of that time’s rapture righty and a good Catholic, Columbus believed that the only way to bring about the Apocalypse was to bring Christianity to all the heathens).

They never mentioned all the raping, pillaging, killing, and slavery in school, of course (the truth being a bit unseemly for kids, I guess). And they never explained how somebody could “discover” a place that already had people living in it (not to mention that the Vikings were already here some 500 years before Columbus). No, they just told us what a brave and virtuous man Christopher Columbus was, and that we should be grateful to him for opening the door for Europeans to come on over, and we learned a line from a really crappy poem by Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr about 1492 and the ocean blue and whatnot.

But, hey, who am I to turn down a day off?