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“I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future."--Ronald Reagan, an Actual President of the United States
Mark Steyn: From Barbarous to Evil
"I woke up to the news that, during the night, in Baltimore, Maryland, the oldest monument to Christopher Columbus in the United States had been destroyed by someone called "Ty" and his chum:
Moonbattery: The Unpersoning of Christopher Columbus Continues; "The ultimate villain is not Robert E. Lee, who merely defended his Virginia homeland, but Christopher Columbus, whose crime was to allow Western Civilization to expand into the New World. If no one had achieved what Columbus did, North America would still be populated by half-starved Stone Age savages and the hated United States would not exist. Consequently, La-La Land is the latest city to proclaim that Columbus Day will henceforth be fundamentally transformed into Indigenous Peoples Day... Although Italian Americans seem to be the only ones who put up a fight against the campaign to unperson Christopher Columbus, he represents all Americans of European heritage, or who appreciate living in a civilized country where life isn’t as nasty, brutish, and short as it was for pre-Columbian Indians. ... There is no aspect of American or Western Culture that these malefactors will not desecrate, demonized, and destroy. Progressives are doing to America what Muslims did to the rich and varied, mainly Christian cultures that once flourished across the Middle East. Everything that we fail to defend will be lost, starting with our pride.".......
Reagan's Farewell: "An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.
But now, we're about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs [protection].
So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important--why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, "We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did." Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.
And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.".......
Again, Mark Steyn: The Totalitarianism of the Now:
"In Memphis, Gone with the Wind is gone with the winds of change buffeting the American inheritance.
Totalitarianism is a young man's game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all "old white men" who'll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth.
My distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle remarks:
But the hyper-present-tense of our own culture has more or less inverted that: We don't mind the doublet and hose, it's the "human nature" that's the problem. So, when today's movies do the period stuff, we impose our values on their times - hence, all the "f*cks" and lesbo sub-plots in recent Miss Marples, or the ghastly boorishness of Robert Downey Jr's outings as Sherlock Holmes. Their times, our values. And because we are, in fact, engaged in overthrowing and remaking "human nature", the past's eternal verities are a particular affront.
It would be foolish to think that contempt can be contained merely to electronic entertainments. Today we insist "empathy" is a virtue, and trumpet our own incessantly.
The more we boast of our "empathy", the less we have - not in the sense of the definition offered by David Berger in his book Clinical Empathy:
I've said many times that, when a people lose their future, they also lose their past: There will be no West End theatre in an Islamized London - no Oscar Wilde, no Bernard Shaw, no Noël Coward, and eventually no Shakespeare. There will be no Berlin Philharmonic in an Islamized Germany - no Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner. There will be no classic rock on the radio dial in an Hispanic Florida - so no Motorhead, no Def Leppard, no Blue Oyster Cult. Such are the vicissitudes of demographic transformation.
But perhaps it won't matter anyway. Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.".......
The Federalist: "Australian Prime Minister John Howard once said that “a conservative is someone who doesn’t think he is morally superior to his grandfather.” But progressives hold the opinion that they are morally superior to their grandparents, while believing that their own grandchildren will somehow not feel the same way about them. That lack of humility makes it easier for them to be certain; it also makes them certain to be wrong.".......
....................................
The Left has always been fond of the Soviet Airbrush, and the Reading of History as one long indictment of the West is generations old now. But it seems like they're now declaring war on the very concept of history itself.
Statue-smashers consider themselves to be the very pinnacle of enlightenment, yet they are more brutish and superstitious than Og the Caveman. At least Og knew that he didn't fall out of his father's uterus a fully-formed, sui generis moral god. They live in a world built on the shoulders of Christopher Columbus, flaws and all, yet are too stupid and arrogant to know it.
And for the record, slavery was practiced by the American Indians and Aztecs long before Columbus came. It's in all the history books these idiots don't read.
At one point, Columbus was imprisoned by Queen Isabella, and remarkably, he's still in trouble with the authorities today. Comrade di Blasio wants to shutter or rename his landmarks--which is understandable for a guy who renamed himself from "Wilhelm" to sound less Germanic.
Columbus made four trips to the New World, the last one probably the most dangerous. He arrived just ahead of a hurricane, but was refused dockage. The experienced Admiral tried to warn the local Governor, but was ignored. The Governor dispatched a fleet of treasure ships to Spain and they were promptly sunk.
Columbus went on to Panama and faced marooning and mutinies. He was the first Westerner to sight the South American coast, but mistook it for an island.
He named the Virgin Islands after St. Ursula and her legendary 11,000 Virgins, who gave their lives for the faith.
"I found it (the world) was not round...but pear shaped, round where it has a nipple, for there it is taller, or as if one had a round ball and, on one side, it should be like a woman's breast, and this nipple part is the highest and closest to Heaven."--Christopher Columbus, Log of his Third Voyage (1498). Columbus thought thought these islands resembled the virgins' breasts:
I don't see it.
But he was a moron after our own hearts. And that's 22,000 more reasons to study history.
We'll give our namesake Ronnie the last word:
“I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future."
How History Happens: "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."--John Green
"It was back in the thirties that I joined the Army Reserves as a member of the 14th Regiment of the—get ready now—horse cavalry. [Laughter] It's not true that I was at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. [Laughter]. In 1778 George Washington erected a fort high upon a granite point overlooking the Hudson to guard the region of New York in the event of a British attack. And now, for more than 180 years, the United States Military Academy, here at West Point, has in effect extended and carried on that first mission. For here we train the men and women whose duty it is to defend the Republic, the men and women whose profession is watchfulness, whose skill is vigilance, whose calling is to guard the peace, but if need be, to fight and win. More than 180 years, West Point in this time has established and added luster to a proud story, a story of courage and wisdom, a story of heroism, of sacrifice, and yes, very often the ultimate sacrifice. It is the story of men like Ulysses Grant, the son of a humble tanner in Ohio who went on from West Point to save the American Union. It's the story of Dwight David Eisenhower, a Kansas farm boy who learned the skills at West Point that enabled him to command the mightiest invasion force in history, and of Douglas MacArthur, an acknowledged genius in war who showed himself during the occupation of Japan to be a genius in peace, as well. And if I may, it's the story of men like General Fred Gorden. The only black cadet in his class, today General Gorden has come back to West Point as Commandant, setting an example for you, and indeed for all young Americans, of what hard work and devotion to duty can achieve. I feel something today of what General MacArthur must have felt. Your youth, your optimism -- they give me strength. And as I look out upon your young faces, I feel as one who will depart the stage almost before you've made your first entrance. I feel in my heart a great confidence in the future of our country, for I know that you will defend that future. And it's true: The long gray line has never failed us."--Pres. Reagan at West Point, 1987
"There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past."-G.K. Chesterton
"When people say to me, as they very naturally will and do and probably should, "Why is this important for us to know in the year (2017)?", that isn't the way I look at it. I think it's important to know for itself. Not because it's going to help us better understand [the events of today], or have a greater equilibrium in a time of trouble. It will do that, absolutely it does that. But it's the same as justifying why should I read Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby [today]. It's the same reason you should have read it in 1989. It is of value, it is of interest unto itself. It's an extension, an enlargement of the experience of being alive. That's what history is. And I don't think anyone ought to be, or really wants to be, provincial in time, any more than one would want to stay locked in the same place in the map all one's life. I have to say too if [the Revolutionary War] had been covered -- [1776] is the most important year in the most important conflict in our history -- if it had been covered by the media, and the country had seen now horrible the conditions were, how badly things were being run by the officers, and what a very serious soup we were in, I think that would have been it, too."--Historian David McCollough
"To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made without, a comparison; but it has never been my fortune to find, either in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have, with equal blindness, hated their country."- Samuel Johnson
"...And so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren't understood; they're not appreciated. And if you don't have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don't mean very much to you. You just think, well, that's the way it is. That's our birthright. That just happened. [But] it didn't just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I mean this. I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn't just to be uneducated or stupid. It's to be rude, ungrateful. And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings."--David McCullough
"I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered."--Gen. R***** E. L**
"Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. ...I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside."--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
"Looking to the past in an effort to keep our country from repeating the errors of history is termed by them as "taking the country back to McKinley." Of course, I never found that was so bad -- under McKinley we freed Cuba."--Ronald Reagan
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."--L.P. Hartley
"There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past."-G.K. Chesterton
"When people say to me, as they very naturally will and do and probably should, "Why is this important for us to know in the year (2017)?", that isn't the way I look at it. I think it's important to know for itself. Not because it's going to help us better understand [the events of today], or have a greater equilibrium in a time of trouble. It will do that, absolutely it does that. But it's the same as justifying why should I read Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby [today]. It's the same reason you should have read it in 1989. It is of value, it is of interest unto itself. It's an extension, an enlargement of the experience of being alive. That's what history is. And I don't think anyone ought to be, or really wants to be, provincial in time, any more than one would want to stay locked in the same place in the map all one's life. I have to say too if [the Revolutionary War] had been covered -- [1776] is the most important year in the most important conflict in our history -- if it had been covered by the media, and the country had seen now horrible the conditions were, how badly things were being run by the officers, and what a very serious soup we were in, I think that would have been it, too."--Historian David McCollough
"To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made without, a comparison; but it has never been my fortune to find, either in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have, with equal blindness, hated their country."- Samuel Johnson
"...And so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren't understood; they're not appreciated. And if you don't have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don't mean very much to you. You just think, well, that's the way it is. That's our birthright. That just happened. [But] it didn't just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I mean this. I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn't just to be uneducated or stupid. It's to be rude, ungrateful. And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings."--David McCullough
"I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered."--Gen. R***** E. L**
"Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. ...I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside."--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
"Looking to the past in an effort to keep our country from repeating the errors of history is termed by them as "taking the country back to McKinley." Of course, I never found that was so bad -- under McKinley we freed Cuba."--Ronald Reagan
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."--L.P. Hartley
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| via StormyBlogger |
"I woke up to the news that, during the night, in Baltimore, Maryland, the oldest monument to Christopher Columbus in the United States had been destroyed by someone called "Ty" and his chum:
A 225-year-old monument commemorating Christopher Columbus was vandalized early Monday amid the nationwide debate on removing Confederate statues and monuments.As you can see at right, almost every word painstakingly engraved on that obelisk has been obliterated. It stood for 225 years, and it was destroyed in the blink of an eye. Julia Manchester, The Hill's reporter, continues:
A video posted on Monday shows the monument being smashed. It shows two unidentified people taping a sign reading "The future is racial and economic justice" on the monument. One of them then hits the monument with what appears to be a sledgehammer while the other stands next to the monument holding a sign that reads "Racism: Tear it down."
"Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere. Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas," the video's narrator, who identifies himself as "Ty," says.
This comes amid a heated debate across the country over removing Confederate monuments...That's one way of putting it, but not an honest one. Mark Steyn Club member David Elstrom left a comment here that deserves to be more widely distributed:
Mark,Indeed. It's hard to have a "conversation" with a guy wielding a sledgehammer.".......
I notice that the left media and even Fox News talk about the "discussion" on statues, or opine on the "conversation" concerning public monuments.
This Newspeak is apparently supposed to con the plebes into thinking something civil or democratic is happening. All I've seen is politicians or other apparatchiks rushing to remove statues (fearing the wrath of the mob) or actual mobs tearing things down.
If this is discussion, or conversation, then rape must be a "social event," and sticking up the local convenience store a "financial transaction."
Moonbattery: The Unpersoning of Christopher Columbus Continues; "The ultimate villain is not Robert E. Lee, who merely defended his Virginia homeland, but Christopher Columbus, whose crime was to allow Western Civilization to expand into the New World. If no one had achieved what Columbus did, North America would still be populated by half-starved Stone Age savages and the hated United States would not exist. Consequently, La-La Land is the latest city to proclaim that Columbus Day will henceforth be fundamentally transformed into Indigenous Peoples Day... Although Italian Americans seem to be the only ones who put up a fight against the campaign to unperson Christopher Columbus, he represents all Americans of European heritage, or who appreciate living in a civilized country where life isn’t as nasty, brutish, and short as it was for pre-Columbian Indians. ... There is no aspect of American or Western Culture that these malefactors will not desecrate, demonized, and destroy. Progressives are doing to America what Muslims did to the rich and varied, mainly Christian cultures that once flourished across the Middle East. Everything that we fail to defend will be lost, starting with our pride.".......
Reagan's Farewell: "An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.
But now, we're about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs [protection].
So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important--why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, "We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did." Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.
And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.".......
Again, Mark Steyn: The Totalitarianism of the Now:
"In Memphis, Gone with the Wind is gone with the winds of change buffeting the American inheritance.
"As an organization whose stated mission is to 'entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves', the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population," the theater's operators said in a statement.As Scarlett O'Hara presciently observed, tomorrow is another day. Indeed, today is the only day - Pol Pot's Year Zero as Bill Murray's Groundhog Day. Upon taking office, Justin Trudeau justified each bit of twerpy modish folderol with the words "Because it's 2015." Why have a "gender-balanced cabinet"? Because it's 2015! Around the toppled statuary of Durham and Baltimore and West Palm Beach, the mob is taking it to the next level: "Because it's 2017", and anything that came before must be destroyed.
Totalitarianism is a young man's game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all "old white men" who'll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth.
My distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle remarks:
You can learn almost everything about life from movies... You will learn, for example, that you are not the first generation to have Problem X or "Solution" Y... Oh, hey, this black and white thing with the stupid title [Goodbye, My Fancy] actually has a "free speech on campus" subplot...The appeal of "old" stories used to be that their truths were so enduring you didn't mind the crinolines and powdered wigs: When I read bedtime stories to my little girl - Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Black Beauty - she did not have an adult's conception of time and so was too young to know or to care that all these people lived years before she was born and were all now dead. She was simply engaged by their quandaries. The endurance of Shakespeare is, as the cliché has it, that he "understands human nature" and so you cut him some slack on the doublet and hose.
But the hyper-present-tense of our own culture has more or less inverted that: We don't mind the doublet and hose, it's the "human nature" that's the problem. So, when today's movies do the period stuff, we impose our values on their times - hence, all the "f*cks" and lesbo sub-plots in recent Miss Marples, or the ghastly boorishness of Robert Downey Jr's outings as Sherlock Holmes. Their times, our values. And because we are, in fact, engaged in overthrowing and remaking "human nature", the past's eternal verities are a particular affront.
It would be foolish to think that contempt can be contained merely to electronic entertainments. Today we insist "empathy" is a virtue, and trumpet our own incessantly.
The more we boast of our "empathy", the less we have - not in the sense of the definition offered by David Berger in his book Clinical Empathy:
The capacity to know emotionally what another is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other person.My emphasis. Not a lot of that in the bright new dawn of our statue-free land. In an empathy-flaunting age we demand the entirety of human history think just like us - "because it's 2017". Robert E Lee must be toppled because he was racist. Thomas Jefferson must come down because he owned slaves. Christopher Columbus has to go because he had no transgender-bathroom policy on the Niña, Pinta and Santa María. The mobs in the street have no idea who these guys are - except that they are not like them, and so cannot be permitted to stand.
I've said many times that, when a people lose their future, they also lose their past: There will be no West End theatre in an Islamized London - no Oscar Wilde, no Bernard Shaw, no Noël Coward, and eventually no Shakespeare. There will be no Berlin Philharmonic in an Islamized Germany - no Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner. There will be no classic rock on the radio dial in an Hispanic Florida - so no Motorhead, no Def Leppard, no Blue Oyster Cult. Such are the vicissitudes of demographic transformation.
But perhaps it won't matter anyway. Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.".......
The Federalist: "Australian Prime Minister John Howard once said that “a conservative is someone who doesn’t think he is morally superior to his grandfather.” But progressives hold the opinion that they are morally superior to their grandparents, while believing that their own grandchildren will somehow not feel the same way about them. That lack of humility makes it easier for them to be certain; it also makes them certain to be wrong.".......
....................................
The Left has always been fond of the Soviet Airbrush, and the Reading of History as one long indictment of the West is generations old now. But it seems like they're now declaring war on the very concept of history itself.
Statue-smashers consider themselves to be the very pinnacle of enlightenment, yet they are more brutish and superstitious than Og the Caveman. At least Og knew that he didn't fall out of his father's uterus a fully-formed, sui generis moral god. They live in a world built on the shoulders of Christopher Columbus, flaws and all, yet are too stupid and arrogant to know it.
And for the record, slavery was practiced by the American Indians and Aztecs long before Columbus came. It's in all the history books these idiots don't read.
At one point, Columbus was imprisoned by Queen Isabella, and remarkably, he's still in trouble with the authorities today. Comrade di Blasio wants to shutter or rename his landmarks--which is understandable for a guy who renamed himself from "Wilhelm" to sound less Germanic.
Columbus made four trips to the New World, the last one probably the most dangerous. He arrived just ahead of a hurricane, but was refused dockage. The experienced Admiral tried to warn the local Governor, but was ignored. The Governor dispatched a fleet of treasure ships to Spain and they were promptly sunk.
Columbus went on to Panama and faced marooning and mutinies. He was the first Westerner to sight the South American coast, but mistook it for an island.
He named the Virgin Islands after St. Ursula and her legendary 11,000 Virgins, who gave their lives for the faith.
"I found it (the world) was not round...but pear shaped, round where it has a nipple, for there it is taller, or as if one had a round ball and, on one side, it should be like a woman's breast, and this nipple part is the highest and closest to Heaven."--Christopher Columbus, Log of his Third Voyage (1498). Columbus thought thought these islands resembled the virgins' breasts:
I don't see it.
But he was a moron after our own hearts. And that's 22,000 more reasons to study history.
We'll give our namesake Ronnie the last word:
“I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future."
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