So, Oz gets Columbus Day off of school. And last week, they learned some of the classic Columbus crap that we learned in school — you know, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two”, and such.

But what surprised me a bit is that the reassessing of Columbus that came to the surface around the 500-year anniversary in 1992 hasn’t made the slightest dent in the bundle of lies told about Columbus: That he “discovered” the new world (uh, the walkers across the Bering Strait did that at least 10,000 year earlier, and Leif Ericson’s vikings came over the Atlantic about 500 years before Columbus, and maybe others); that he discovered that the Earth was round (again, at least a couple thousand years late on that one; and if you didn’t know that, it’s hard to see how finding some islands several thousand miles to the west exactly showed that). I don’t need them to preach my lefty line about how he really was the inventor of trans-Atlantic slave trading, but they should at least stop telling the outright lies. It was the start of the opening of the new world to the European exploration and colonization that produced our modern world. You can say that without telling the stupid traditional lies.

And hey, Oz has Italian ancestry on his Mom’s side; and if the Italian-Americans want to have their own version of St. Patrick’s day, fine. But let’s stop using it as an occasion to tell a bunch of Euro-centric lies about history to schoolkids. But didn’t we kind of more or less all agree on this in 1992?