COLUMBUS DAY WEEKEND

Yes. Let's celebrate the destruction of many civilizations based in Nature religion and ecologically sound life on the Earth. Let's celebrate the imposition of Christianity through torture and genocidal massacre. Let's name the celebration after an exiled Italian who managed to get funding from the princes of the Spanish Inquisition. Their claim to fame was the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain. How truly relevant to this year's pre-election season here in the U.S.. Let's all get drunk on alcohol or high on legalized marijuana.

I listened to an American voters' panel on BBC this morning. They were discussing the upcoming Presidential election. I was astounded by their general lack of understanding of history, politics and American contemporary reality. It seemed the British moderator had to steer them into sane discussion by prompting them with real facts. Downright embarrassing.

The most memorable statement of their History for Dummies was the assertion by a Muslim-American woman that the U.S. was founded and built by Muslims. Yes, folks. She wasn't going to buy into that silly Mormon notion that America was founded by a lost tribe of Israel who were actually the pupae of Latter Day Saints. No. According to this Einstein, the U.S. was founded and built by African Muslims who were brought here as slaves. 

Now, I do not dispute that some of the African slaves may have been touched by Islam. After all, the Arabs who ran the slave trade in much of Africa were indeed Muslims.I also do not dispute that African slave labor, alongside Anglo-Saxon slave labor in the form of indenture, contributed to the rural prosperity of the early U.S.. But, declaring some kind of shared moral superiority as an American based on the slave trade after railing against the genocide of American Indian tribes by "white people"seems a serious stretch. It was a major stretch coming from a second-generation American who was raised in relative wealth in Manhattan.

This is the America, as seen by media, of this Columbus Day Weekend in 2016. It is not the America of decent hard-working people who are educated enough to know better. It is not the America of those who see the real problems of this country: Exceptionalism, selfishness, greed, materialism, hypocritical religiosity, corruption, etc.. It is not the America of people who are simply trying to live a good life without much concern at all about racism, minority status or ethnocentrism. Those Americans move around in their daily lives undiscovered by media. They do not draw eyes to Web pages  and TV's, or ears to radio. They are being swept away in virtual America like their American Indian predecessors were in an earlier time.