Working through Labor Day.

Happy Labor Day! I'll be working all day, thanks very much. Someone has to keep the engine of commerce running. YOU'RE WELCOME.

Alas, the life of the freelancer. Assignments come in at random and deadlines are deadly. But it's all right; I had no social plans for today. Working on a holiday never bothered me unless I was missing a party I wanted to attend, and as I've gotten older, I have found precious few events that meet that particular criterion. 

Pardon me if I've told this story in this space before: When I was in college I worked for a time as a general dogsbody for a small midtown office that did a lot of mailings, and I mean a lot. They did not observe Columbus Day, but the post office certainly did. However, in Manhattan at least, the post office itself did not sleep; its windows were shuttered and its postmen were at rest, but the big sorting offices were still open. If a company wanted to get a dozen sacks of mail into the system that day, they just had to bring it to the loading dock and it would be cheerfully accepted. All they needed were the sacks, a big dolly, and a dopey college student who needed the money.

Well, if you've ever done this kind of work, you discover quickly that getting the four wheels of a dolly to play nicely together is like getting the band into the studio after the third album flopped and the tour disintegrated into fistfights. You also discover that, as smooth as they look in most places, the sidewalks of Manhattan are in fact pitted and furrowed as a centenarian's face; that the smallest amounts of litter can jam a little wheel; that the curb cuts may be and should be perfect for wheelchairs but are not wide enough for dollies; that mailbags love nothing better than to swing freely from the handle to which you tied them and drag on the ground or at least throw off the dolly's forward impetus; that the sewer grates are sinking everywhere and love nothing better than to reach out and take a bite out of a small and errant wheel. I don't remember how many blocks it was, but it was too many. Still, I got there, and delivered the goods, and the dolly and I made it back safely. 

So it's not a bad thing to work on the holidays. But it's a lot easier to do it at home, doing research on your laptop for pay, than to be shoving an uncooperative dolly through the pitiless streets of the naked city to deliver pamphlets to be mailed, most of which would be thrown away upon reception.

I still maintain that everyone in college should have a job like that. Or at food service or delivery, or something else low-paying and unexpectedly challenging. It teaches humility, but also self-respect, which is far better than ballooned-up pride that contains a deep sense of inadequacy. Plus, you might get a funny story out it. 

Sail some more.

I was thinking about a new project -- Sail Some More: The Columbus Musical. Doesn't that sound exciting? I've heard that historical musicals are all the rage now, and not quite so likely as other things to get canceled. 

Best of all, we can use existing songs for the show! Most musicals on Broadway no longer debut a raft of new numbers; they use songs very familiar to the audience. If we can get the rights to numbers like these, half the job is done! 

"Money (That's What I Want)" (Court of Ferdinand and Isabella)
"Come Sail Away" (Recruiting crew)
"Stuck Like Glue" (Sargasso Sea)
"Hello, I Love You" (The New World)
"Gold" (Got any dough?)
"Get Back" (Return to Spain)

And so on. 

Now, for a non-stupid take on Columbus Day, I recommend this short article by Dave Seminara in the incomparable City Journal about the destruction of Columbus statues throughout American cities, statues often paid for by proud but poor Italian immigrants of the sort who often faced discrimination here and did not think that films like Goodfellas were a how-to guide:

Columbus’s voyages to the New World did result in the decimation of Native American communities that lived under Spanish rule. But this was obviously not a premeditated genocide—neither Columbus nor anyone alive at the time understood what we now know about infectious diseases and germs. That makes no difference to the woke police, for whom no historical figure born decades or centuries ago can pass muster.

Or you can read my piece from 2017 on how America-hating Islamists have only themselves to blame for the creation of America. 

Here in New York, Governor Andrew "Evil Eyes" Cuomo, the biggest embarrassment to American Italians since Sacco and Venzetti, is unveiling a new statue not of Columbus but of Mother Frances Cabrini in Battery Park. Of course, this being New York, the reason Cuomo got involved is that the literally sainted nun was snubbed by the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm, mayor of New York, when she was putting together a program to honor prominent city women with statues. Cuomo used state funds to add Mother Cabrini. 

It's one of the few moves made by Cuomo that I think is acceptable. It's always worth raising another martini to Mother Cabrini. By doing it on Columbus Day, he also allows Italians to have something to celebrate that is not Columbus, so it is a clever move. Of course, he'd like to have some good press for anything at the moment, if you know what I mean. De Blasio doesn't seem to care anymore, though.

Manhattan has at least not yet lost its famous statue of the bold navigator in Columbus Circle on Central Park West. It helps that it's on the National Register of Historic Places -- also that it's 76 feet above a busy traffic circle and hard for the wokeistas to get at.

Not to mention that the city is still full of Italians who would probably be ready to kick some Antifass if they threatened it. 

Christopher Columbus was no saint, but he suffered plenty for his sins in this life, and most of the things he's hated for by the politically correct were things he didn't even intend to do. Keep alert up there, Chris; let us know if you see them coming for you. 

Columbus: Floater.

I don't really feel like writing about Columbus Day today. I've written before about that remarkable man and the history behind the day; also about how Italians need to fight back against the menace of "Indigenous Persons Day" (a day solely made to try to eclipse Columbus and the spirit of discovery). Today I'd just like to note my own history of Columbus Day, which hasn't been much of anything since high school.

What I mean by that is, I've had to work every Columbus Day I can remember since I started college. Sure, my college was closed for the holiday, but not the office where I was lucky to have a part-time job as a general flunky. (The stories of things I massively screwed up in that job would make Will Ferrell, Pauly Shore, and Jerry Lewis wince.) I don't even know what the business did. Something real-estatey. It was a small, family-owned firm, and all I know for sure was that they both generated and received a lot of mail.

That was how I found out that, in a large city, although the mail would not be delivered on Columbus Day, you could send a flunky (me) down to the local post office to get the mail. All you had to do was bring something on letterhead authorizing said flunky to pick it up, and I think call ahead to let them know the flunkster was on his way. Please note that this is all to the best of my memory; don't quote me. It was a long time ago and I was as new as a baby out of the womb, and knew about as much.

Anyway, all this meant that I wound up dragging a couple of sacks of mail about seven or eight blocks back to the building. But that was okay; every other job I'd had to that point had involved lifting heavy things. Much worse was a later, rainy day -- possibly Veterans Day -- when I had to deliver a dozen sacks of mail to the same post office on a wobbly cart with wonky wheels that was not large enough for the job. That's another story.

This was my first job with an actual paycheck, a check that had actual taxes taken out of it. It would not be the last. And I think that all those jobs in my future would have this in common: no Columbus Day off.

"You! Get to work!"

I'm not sure, though. My first job in publishing was a small outfit connected to a nonprofit, and those guys get every holiday. But in the deadline-driven places I subsequently worked, holidays were often a major inconvenience and fit to be ignored. One job involved coordinating with a lot of British people in London, who were not off on Columbus Day, of course. Magazines I worked for closed issues around the second week of the month, which meant that not only was Columbus Day not a holiday, but it was a late night. I don't say all of this to complain, just to note that I haven't often had the day off. In fact, I have a huge pile of work to do today.

Columbus Day is, sadly, like Veterans Day, a second-tier holiday that people seldom get as a paid day off. They may be given the days as floaters, to use on the holiday or some other time. Many of those who do get these days off have little respect for Columbus or veterans. I guess that can happen to national holidays in a nation where millions of people have strong but varied priorities.

I just want a day off with pay. But Columbus didn't get one; why should I?

Who made whom?

A few years ago I wrote the following short piece on the old, extinct Blog.com blog, a piece that was itself developed from something I wrote years before that (maybe five years after 9/11) for another guy's blog (since taken down). Every year Christopher Columbus comes under more attack, along with everything else in Western history -- it's not enough that our history must be turned on its head, now it needs to be expunged entirely. But I am still an admirer of Columbus, and the more I've read about him the more I find him to be a brave, persistent, and intelligent sailor. A book I read in the last year about the myths of the Bermuda Triangle informed me of his cool head when his ships were becalmed on the weird Sargasso Sea. 

Anyway, here was my take:

Batman: You killed my parents.
The Joker: What? What? What are you talking about?
Batman: I made you, you made me first.
The Joker: Hey, bat-brain, I mean, I was a kid when I killed your parents. I mean, I say "I made you" you gotta say "you made me." I mean, how childish can you get?

I always think of this around Columbus Day. A couple of years after September 11, 2001, I was thinking about the manifold grievances that the Muslim world claimed to have about America, and all the mean things we did to them since around the time O'Bannon captured Derna in 1805.

Well, if it hadn't been for the Muslim domination of the trade routes to India and China (a domination that was not enforced by sternly worded letters to the editor), Columbus would not have thought to try a Western route to what used to be called the Orient. No Muslim blockade, no discovery of America. They brought us on themselves.

Oh, sure, someone would probably have gotten here from Europe anyway, someone with more staying power than the Vikings, who apparently couldn't find enough houses to steal or stuff to rape or women to burn to want to stick around. (To be fair, although the Northmen had great navigation skills, the Viking colonies outside of Europe were quite cut off from their home countries, which was a problem when things got rough.) 

To make a successful colony would have required better and bigger ships. It also needed someone as clever at navigation as Columbus also was at promotion, someone as brave as a barrel of sharks, someone with enough charisma to keep a small fleet intact on a voyage that could be straight to hell for all anyone knew, a voyage that by anyone's estimation was not exactly a Carnival cruise, then go back, and then do the round-trip again, three more times in all. For most of my life people have been down on Christopher Columbus, but by God the man had more guts than any next thousand guys you meet. There was a time when real courage, sustained over the long term, meant something to people. 

Well, it means something to me. I admire all the virtues, especially those I do not have. 

Happy Columbus Day!