Category: History

Christopher Columbus — Five Point Two Oh

Like it or not, on October 12th, 520 years ago, Christopher Columbus showed up somewhere in the Caribbean and changed history.  He didn’t exactly discover America — it had been here all along — but he did reveal it to a less-than-curious European population.  Actually, for the longest time, our European ancestors didn’t care much about the Western hemisphere.  They just thought it was a great lumpy bit that kept getting in the way.  After all, Columbus had convinced the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to give him a boatload of money for a passage to India.  He wasn’t about to admit he’d miscalculated the distance by several thousand miles.  So, for a generation or so, Chris and his Spanish compadres dicked around in El Caribe, insisting that untold riches were just over the horizon and playing poor cousin to the Portuguese.  The Portuguese had gone the other way, by the way, with Vasco da Gama in 1498, and had actually reached the spice emporiums of India where they were making nothing but money.  It wasn’t until Cortez, one of the most enigmatic figures in history, discovered gold around the necks of the Aztec nobility in 1519 that the big boys back in Spain, France and England sat up and took notice.  What happened next was nearly five centuries of relentless worldwide imperialism that ended in 1956 when French and British paratroopers landed on the Suez Canal in the last wheezing gasp of European hegemony.  That’s a pretty bold footprint for the son of a weaver out of the ‘hood in Genoa.

Actually, that’s the gist of it.  Despite the fact that Columbus was just one of literally hundreds of ambitious men seeking their fortune in an expanding world, he’s the guy everybody latches on to.  For the last fifty years, he’s been taking the hit for every dirty deed ever perpetrated on the indigenous peoples of our world since he weighed anchor on August 3rd, 1492.  His name is now so blackened by revisionist history that people who’ve never heard of Francisco Pizarro look the other way when it comes up in polite conversation.  It’s gotten so bad that even historians forget what he was doing here in the first place.  So here’s a quick and dirty history of why Christopher Columbus — without all the “ain’t it awfuls” everybody is so much in love with these days.

In the first part of the 15th century, an obscure group of Turks called the Ottomans was moving up the social ladder by beating up their neighbours.  In 1453, they conquered Constantinople, the last Christian bastion of the (long outmoded) Roman Empire.  For the next couple of hundred years, they pretty much ran the show in the eastern Mediterranean.   At the other end of the Mediterranean, the Christian kings (and queens) of the Iberian Peninsula had spent the last seven centuries fighting with their neighbours, the Moslem Moors, and were on the verge of sending them packing, back to North Africa.  Meanwhile, around about the same time, Europeans were finally recovering from the Black Death that had killed anywhere from 30 to 50% of the population.  It was the biggest seller’s market in history, and a whole new middle class of merchants. labourers and trades people had coin in their jerkins to indulge themselves in the finer things in life: things like ivory and silk and the hottest commodity of them all: exotic spices.  Supply and demand were about to meet in a head-on collision.

Politics, religion and economics have always been strange bedfellows.  However, it didn’t take a da Vinci to figure out that, regardless of how much people were willing to pay to put pepper in their paella, all spices came from the east — and unfortunately that window, Constantinople, had been closed.   Suddenly, between religious animosity and the cost of doing business (it was a six month caravan ride across North Africa) the price of anything but bland in Europe went through the roof.

Enter Henry the Navigator, king of Portugal.  His nautical boys had been sailing down the coast of Africa for a century, and he knew that, if you went south far enough, you ended up going east — and that’s where the spices were.  He put two and two together and decided that, instead of sucking up to the Moslems for cinnamon and nutmeg (and paying outrageous prices for the privilege) he could simply go around them.  For half a century, the Portuguese tried.

At the same time, our buddy Columbus was doing his homework.  Like all educated men of the period, he knew the world was basically a sphere, and like all sailors, he had a rough and ready knowledge of how to calculate latitude.  Besides, he’d shipped out with the Portuguese a time or two and had a hunch that Africa was a lot bigger that anyone realized.  So he did the math and, based on (very) simple ratios, he surmised that, if he sailed west instead of east, he’d find India — somewhere around Cancun.  The problem was Columbus had no idea how to figure out longitudes.  He wasn’t alone.  Longitude or east/west distance would baffle scientists and explorers for another 300 years.  Anyway, Columbus took his project to the money people of the time – royalty — and was turned down every time.  Their argument was “Look, Chris!  The world’s bigger than that!”  However, our boy stuck to his guns and kept knocking on doors.  Finally, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (who had already turned him down once, BTW) decided what the hell.  They gave him a 10% share of the profits, told him he had to raise half the money himself and agreed to name him Admiral of the Seas — if he actually got back.  My thought is they didn’t think he would.  Regardless, Columbus did the medieval equivalent of a fist pump and the next thing you know Rodrigo de Triana, a lookout on El Pinta, is shouting “Land Ho!”

That’s it — in a nutshell.  The revisionists can talk as they please about who was responsible for what — after he got here.  However, the only reason Columbus ever showed up at all is pepper was selling for big bucks on the European market, and he and a whole pile of other people wanted to cash in on the profits.  You see, history doesn’t change; the people who tell it do.

Neil Armstrong 1930 – 2012

Some 40+ years ago, American knowhow and emerging technology sent an ordinary guy from Ohio, Neil Armstrong, to walk on the Moon.  It was an act of boots on the ground audacity that has since never been equaled.  “One small step for a man: one giant leap for mankind” was the culmination of the Big Idea, that magical mystical moment when people believe, tuck their egos away and apply all their energy, ambition and ability to reach for the stars.  When people do that, even the sky isn’t the limit.  Neil Armstrong was (and still is) the symbol of that selflessness.  Even as America changed its royal family from the Kennedys to the Kardashians Armstrong remained the reluctant hero – America’s last Gary Cooper.  He realized, better than anyone else on this planet, that, in fact, walking on the moon was not his accomplishment.

Neil Armstrong’s boot on the Moon changed history, but not simply because he put it there.  America’s Space Program and Moon landings produced much more than just an indelible footprint on an extraterrestrial body.  The innovation and technology alone changed our society.  Without Armstrong’s size 12s, our world would look very different from what we see around us today.  Let me demonstrate.

One of the first problems NASA encountered when it began flinging men out of our atmosphere is that pens (ordinary ballpoint pens) would not write in the weightlessness of space.  It was a small thing but critical to humanity’s conquest of the heavens.  Immediately, NASA set about solving the problem.  They hired a team of engineers, equipped labs and technical facilities, spent literally millions of dollars on the study of hydraulics in a vacuum and came up with the Zero Gravity Pen.  The Soviets, who had discovered the same problem some months earlier, thought about it thoroughly and gave their cosmonauts pencils.

Make no mistake: this story is absolute fiction (the Fisher Space Pen was developed independently in 1965.)  However, for decades, it has roamed our planet, masquerading as fact.  The important thing to note, is that even as most people believe this tale to be true, they are missing the significance of its allegorical message.

The pen-and-pencil myth is meant to show the narrow-minded American approach to problem solving.  Unable to think outside the box, they invariably ignore the simple solution and just throw money around promiscuously in a virtual orgy of waste.  This may be true to the casual observer, but look a little closer.  Yes, the pencil is an ingenious solution in the short term, but in the long term, it’s a dead end.  It doesn’t further the scope of innovation or engineering or scientific discovery or anything.  In actual fact, it stops the clock.

Fact or fiction, the residual value of the Zero Gravity Pen is enormous.  The American race for the moon provided the world with one of the greatest scientific leaps forward in human history.  They beat the Soviets by some years, and the seeds NASA planted doing it, grew into the technological wonders of our age – everything from miniaturization to massive personal computing power.  Almost at the exact moment the American-developed Internet was beginning to stride across the world like a new Colossus, the Soviet Union was imploding under the weight of its own stagnation.  Metaphorically, the Soviets were still using pencils.

So what does this have to do with the death of an American hero?  Not much, except that, at the very epicentre of NASA’s scientific and technological revolution, Neil Armstrong understood both the significance and the insignificance of his contribution.  He was the public face of the Space Race.  It was a man on the moon that galvanized the energies of a nation. Yet, for every footprint Armstrong left on the lunar surface, there had been literally thousands of nameless engineers and technicians whose job it was to put them there.  They were the ones who changed our world from pencils to Touch Screen Smartphones.

Neil Armstrong is an American hero — a man bold enough to go where no man had gone before.  But he also understood how he got there, was humbled by it, and, for the rest of his life, acted accordingly.

Anti-Americanism: The Changing of the Guard

As the Olympic Games continue and China and the United States duke it out for world supremacy in training and nutrition (nudge-nudge/wink-wink) something amazing is going on.  Ever so slightly, ever so carefully, the world is shifting its attitude away from blatant anti-Americanism.  It’s not a tectonic shift, by any means; just a subtle hint now and again.  Make no mistake, hating America is still the world’s #1 leisure activity, but every once in a while, at these Games at least, they’re not the ad infinitum root of all evil they’ve been accused of for more than half a century.

Anti-Americanism was born in the mid 60s when an entire stratum of pampered young people (with incredible buying power) went on a five-year temper tantrum.  They were pissed because, for the first time in their lives, they couldn’t get their own way.  Unfortunately, their sheer numbers and economic impact turned what was ordinary youthful discontent into a cultural revolution.  Half-educated, they were unable to distinguish between theoretical Marxism and the real thing and thus saw capitalist America as the big bad bogeyman.  America, run by the veterans of a simpler time, never understood the situation and exacerbated it by stumbling around the rice paddies of Southeast Asia in an idiot attempt to contain communism.  By the time Vietnam’s General Giap unleashed The Tet Offensive in 1968, America had squandered most of the prestige it had accumulated from World War II.   Richard Nixon and Watergate finished it off.

Today, three generations later, anti-Americanism is a worldwide institution.  All political, spiritual and economic arguments end when America gets the blame.  They are responsible for Global Warming, Globalization and every other global godawful anything that happens to wander by, including poverty, famine and Justin Bieber.  Hell cannot hold half their nastiness, and their stupidity is beyond the ability of Charles Darwin to figure out.  American leaders are schizophrenic in their cunning, both dumb as the proverbial box of rocks and capable of creating any number of complex and nefarious conspiracies.  These plots are conducted by the shadowy and “omnipotent” CIA and are intricate in their planning, massive in their scope and have never (at the time of this writing) worked.  They are usually discovered, after the fact, by a dedicated team of sceptics, operating from the relative comfort of their parents’ basements.

Popular wisdom has it that America has both faked the moon landing and destroyed the ozone layer.  The greedy bastards have sent their corporate lackeys out into the world to destroy all indigenous cultures and to fast-food the fitness out of innocent children.  They have alien technology they won’t share and a cultural bankruptcy they’re forcing on the rest of us.  They are gun-happy cowboys who like nothing better than buggering up everything they touch.  In short, when America wakes up, Satan hides under the sofa.

The weirdest thing about anti-Americanism is, though, even in our uber-sensitive world, it’s not seen as bigotry, prejudice or even ignorance.  It is so ingrained in the world’s thinking that nobody even questions it.  Many people don’t even admit it exists.  The most common statement to that end is, “I’m not anti-American … but” and then the speaker launches into an anti-American tirade worthy of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher combined.  Like prejudice everywhere, it doesn’t matter what bigots say before they get to the “but.”  It’s what comes after the qualifier that counts.

Of course, up until recent history, America has been a catchall for a lot of people’s dissatisfaction.  They get the flak because, for the last sixty years or so, they’ve always been front and centre.  They may not be omnipotent, but they’ve certainly been omnipresent.  And that’s what’s changing in our little world.  Slowly but surely, China is reaching its fingers into the international community, and they’re discovering that there’s a whole lot more to being a world power than selling toasters to Italians.  Many people have gone from looking at China through a telescope to putting it under the microscope.  China has already played the racist card (a time-honoured tradition, pioneered by the Japanese) a couple of times to deflect criticism, but that’s not going to last forever.  As more and more people discover China — up close and personal — there will be criticism.  It’s inevitable.  After all, there is no Chinese utopia – any more than there was an American one.  However, for now, it’s interesting to watch the world tiptoeing around the coming Chinese Colossus and hearing a collective American sigh of relief as the spotlight shifts across the Pacific.