Perhaps because we live in Nevada where Columbus Day is not a holiday it is hard for us to get too excited on the debate whether Christopher Columbus should be honored for his world changing discovery.
We were tempted to put quotes around discovery but thought again.
Yes, he did discover America.
He was not the first to find it of course.
He was not even the first European to do so.
But thanks to the new technology available to him and more than a fair amount of chutzpah he was the first to successfully argue for the exploitation of the New World and thus change forever the history of the Old.
Yes as a person he was not that great of a guy. But to blame him for all the misfortune and tragedy brought by European conquest of North and South America is a bit much. We know he had help lots of help. Perhaps given his druthers the first settlement of the Caribbean might not have been so brutal or perhaps not.
But the bottom line is that without his unabashed lie, and he knew he was lying, that one could get to the Orient by sailing west for a 1,400 miles and his other lie that he found the traces of untold wealth on one of the poorest islands in the Caribbean, European settlement of the Americas might have been stalled a generation or more.
Before Columbus sailed off on his historic voyage, Spain and the rest of Western Europe were preparing to start a new crusade to liberate North Africa and the Holy Land once again from the Muslims.
That war would have lasted decades at least perhaps a century or two and would have left little manpower or treasure to invest for anything else.
It was much easier to conquer the Americas where iron had not yet been discovered rather than recapturing Jerusalem that was defended with cannon.
But that option was not known to Europe until Columbus.
The evils committed by the Europeans upon the native Americans cannot be denied and are rightly condemned.
But while the Europeans were savages so too were the natives.
Cortez did not conquer the human sacrificing Aztecs with 50 conquistadors. He conquered them with 50 conquistadors and a million man army made up of subjugated tribes who were fed up with seeing their people hearts ripped out every time the Aztecs had a holiday.
For all the brutality and inhumanity of the medieval Catholic church, compared to the Aztec religion it was pretty damned touchy feely.
Yes everything is relative even evil.
But while Columbus personally did evil no one can deny his audacity in selling his second voyage and his third and later the whole exploration of the new continents.
He came back to Spain after his discovery with almost nothing.
The immense wealth of the Americas was 50 years in the future, he brought back some parrots and a few natives who died shortly after their arrival.
And yet by the force of his own personality he convinced the Spanish court that he achieved greatness.
That is why he should get a day.
On the other hand a new study is breathing life in the old theory that the Navigator was in fact a secret Jew.
As a not so secret member of the tribe all we can say is: No one is going to pin this guy on us.