Hot damn, dear reader…though it’s not officially observed until tomorrow here in the States, today was the actual day Columbus discovered America for the Europeans and the world was truly born.
Let’s dispense with the hand-wringing and the insipid, anachronistic moralizing for just one goddamn minute, shall we? Let’s talk about the moment the world stopped being a fragmented collection of provincial backwaters and became, for the first time, a singular, unified whole. Of course I’m talking about 1492. I’m talking about the day a stubborn, possibly half-crazy Genoese navigator dragged humanity, kicking and screaming, into its own future.
Picture it, man…a trio of glorified wooden tubs, the Niña, Pinta, and the flagship Santa Maria, bobbing on an endless, terrifyingly blue expanse of nothingness. Weeks have turned into a month, then more, the crew a fetid stew of scurvy, desperation, and the kind of mutinous whispers that end with captains getting tossed to the sharks. The men, a collection of Europe’s finest jail-scourings and debtors, are ready to string up their admiral from the highest yardarm. They see only a watery grave. Their admiral, Christopher Columbus, this lunatic with the glint in his eye, sees only destiny. He has gambled everything – reputation, life, the backing of the Spanish crown – on a hunch so cosmically audacious it borders on psychosis: that he can reach the East by sailing west.
And then, land. Not Cipango, not the gilded courts of the Great Khan, but something else entirely. Something new. A verdant smear on the horizon that resolves into an island he christens San Salvador. Rather than an oppressive act of cruelty, this was an act of cosmic insemination. The moment that salty, exhausted boot hit the sand was the Big Bang of the modern age. It was the point-blank refutation of flat-earth timidity and the glorious, unapologetic affirmation of human will.
This single even, this one man’s refusal to accept the world as it was presented to him, lit the fuse on the Age of Exploration. It was the gunshot that echoed across continents, waking Europe from its medieval slumber and yanking the Americas into the grand and chaotic narrative of global history. It was the genesis of everything we now call “globalization” – the messy, brutal, and ultimately sublime collision of cultures, technologies, and ideas that would forge the world we inhabit.
To view this monumental juncture through the pathetic lens of 21-century guilt is to miss the point so profoundly as to be intellectually dishonest. This was not a tea party. It was the brutal, beautiful, and necessary birth of a new epoch. It was the moment history drew a deep breath and roared. Columbus didn’t simply stumble upon a new landmass; he shattered the old world’s cognitive map and, in doing so, created the very planet we recognize today. It was, without reservation or apology, the single greatest thing to ever happen. Period.
And now, for the absurd postscript of our age: the modern “land acknowledgment.” Jesus. Nothing says genuine solidarity like a fragile, self-congratulatory recital at the start of every TED-adjacent conference – a kind of liturgical guilt-venting for the overeducated, lightly organic white liberal, performed with the smugness of a yoga instructor who’s read one (1) book about colonialism. Because why actually do anything when you can stare solemnly at your shoes and mumble how you “honor” the land you’re squatting on, right? Here’s a radical idea: if you really believed in the cause, you’d sing over your mortgage to whatever tribe most recently claimed the land…hand the keys to your urban colonial compound, and take up residence in your Prius post-haste. Try that at your next dinner party and watch the laughter – real, nervous, guilty laughter – ricochet around the kombucha bar. Either give it all back or, for everyone’s sake, spare us the tragicomedy and just shut the fuck up.
N.P.: “I Really Wanna” – Mammoth
India and Pakistan
Russia and Ukraine
