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“Hand cannons in twelve year old hands / you have to think, think twice to find the logic in that. And it's a black magic to re-script the past, the boys get burnt and the girls get gassed.”

Lately I've been combing through those lines in my mind at the strangest of hours and mile markers; quite possibly I have struck a marker on the backside of my own mind. I have dug a cognitive hole so to speak and purposely fallen in.

The story gets good wiggle as I was on the porch one evening with a friend. We were drinking and ranting and having such a tremendous verbal exchange that we punched the eject button with regards to conversational etiquette and staged fever pitch conversations one on top of the other. Only half drunk revolutionaries can argue in excited agreement so loudly.

Later that week, I think I had a small revelation provided by Howard Zinn, said friend, and the good Captain Morgan. The revelation plays like this: at the start and end of all the pain, war profiteering, money grubbing, traditions of genocide, and cultural oppression in America, we stare blankly and unabashed at that bastard Christopher Columbus.

America has been birthed, bred, and weaned on the same genocidal drive that got Columbus the funding for his return venture to Hispaniola. At first, when that subjugating prick landed in Hispaniola he was not ready to really begin the carnage. He gathered a few natives and the smattering of gold that was available in their simple and beautiful culture, and went to the queen for more ships and arms to come back and make the cash. He of course lied feverishly about the gold and resources of the Island. Columbus lied so well that the court in Madrid gave him seventeen ships for his whirlwind return.

But the fact that Columbus was a crafty misinformed liar is not where I am really taking us. I was more interested in documenting the hubris of a man like Columbus.

The real jam in this doughnut lies in the following quote from Columbus himself, related in a book by Howard Zinn:

“’They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... They were well built, with good bodies and handsome features... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.’

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like the Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.”

So right about now you are wondering what this all has to do with the chorus quoted which is meant to highlight the nature of the dire resistance that is amassed when we find ourselves as Americans invading foreign lands on poorly manufactured principals.

The connection is simple.

We the people of the United States of America have grown accustomed to ignoring genocide and horrific injustice when it suits us. Don't think for a second that the slaughter in Iraq is not flesh on all of our plates; after all, we can't have that mad man putting a chokehold on all the world’s oil supply. He could topple capitalism as we know and hate it.