Cristóbal Colón
David Miller searches tweets on Columbus Day for 16 minutes before becoming nearly violently ill.
Leave it to Twitter to make you feel ‘ambient awareness’ on Columbus Day. I keep thinking of my crew in Colorado. Denver always has a good old fashioned drumbeating protest against Cristóbal Colón. Segundo told me about it one year, said ‘you’re down down there just jamming. Then you look up at a streetcorner and see these cameras filming you.”
Where did “Columbus” come from anyway? What’s the etymology of that one? And why didn’t we just learn his real name–Cristóbal Colón? Colón as in colon-ization?
Looking for answers today so I thought I’d just track Twitter for a little while. Then the idea to begin copying / pasting. By the time I’d do a search, copy and paste something that seemed relevant or ‘engaging’ or ‘weak-ass to the point of being able to be used ironically’, then go back and search again, there would already be between 20-200 more updates. It was like fishing in a fast and very polluted river, your hook baited with Chicken McNuggets. I could only take it for 16 minutes.
As always I just wanted some kind of voice / place / story / character. Most of it, predictably, was just marketing, but not all:
Tweets on “columbus day”
@homegrownian: We’re making salmon breakfast sandwiches on indigenous heirloom Makah Potato demi baguettes in honor of not celebrating Columbus day
@eccehomo84 “They Came Through the Islands.” Pablo Neruda. Canto General on Columbus Day.
@OHSSpanish1 10.12.09 ¡Feliz día de la Raza! In Spanish-speaking countries, Columbus Day is celebrated as the Day of the (Hispanic)Race.
@IshFish is celebrating columbus day by eating, facebook, and watching movies…thank you Columbus for making this possible…
@TAMartinsen Columbus day just screwed me over.
@thekatinthehat aghhh I need to go shopping and I need a haircut . oh greaaat – it. Columbus day. everything is closed so we are left with nothing to do. ):
@bretta75 Cracking up over a friend’s rant about how Columbus Day should not be a recognized holiday! Lol.
@pmoallemian My deep sympathies to survivors of one of the largest acts of genocide on this planet on the day to honor the victims aka the Columbus Day.
Costco is packed like a Saturday. The world must be off celebrating Columbus Day. . .
@vtsheen Costco is packed like a Saturday. The world must be off celebrating Columbus Day, I thought our economy was crappy!?
@gletham What am I supposed to do on Columbus day? Feels like any other day…
@sockonafish “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” Happy Columbus Day!
@Maxbp To the PC police: “Happy Columbus Day!” That’s right I said Columbus. War, conquest, slavery all existed in America before he arrived.
@dbsalk Read the first chapters of James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and then try to tell me that we should celebrate Columbus Day.
@writingvixen Happy Columbus Day! Leave it to America to celebrate a day honoring how men just won’t stop and ask for directions.
@kahpang Columbus Day is such a joke… how can you “discover” a land when there are already people living there?
@dahveed_miller Columbus Day: a woman at the park was feeding her infant Chicken McNuggets.
@surfingdairy Looking for something fun to do with the kids on Columbus Day? We’re open!
Community Connection
Big up native peoples worldwide. What do you think of Columbus Day?
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ha. you know that one had a sweet irony too. one of the few tweets i looked up afterwards. they’re actually a like a petting zoo or something up in the mountains of hawaii. if ever there’s a people with cause not to celebrate columbus day (i guess it would be captain cook day), it’s native hawaiians.
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Yours was my favorite, David.
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thanks christine.
this has been a weird day. infants being mcnuggeted.
someone has to ‘document’
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Blech. When I lived in Puerto Rico I was always struck by the irony of Columbus Day celebrations.
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Wow. Just. Wow. A frightening little mosaic you’ve put together here.
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I, for one, am not a huge fan of Columbus Day, so I really enjoyed a couple of those, and the random mcnuggeted infant
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Here in Berkeley it’s “Indigenous Peoples Day”
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Lies my Teacher Told me… I want to read that!
Luckily, my 5th grade teacher sets her classes straight on Columbus Day. She gave each group a really happy go lucky statement about Columbus a week before and sent us out to research it.
I think the idea was that disproving something stuck it in your head longer than proving it would. It worked.
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I get not wanting to celebrate the day, but no matter who you are, it’s highly likely your people once pillaged and plundered. What’s remarkable now, is that it’s stopped, not that it used to happen. What’s even more remarkable is if we find a way to stop it completely.
That said, it is interesting that he’s considered a discoverer. He was a pioneer no doubt, but the land came prediscovered.
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