You can buy this song here.
Columbus wasn’t just a brave and smart navigator, he was also a raping, murdering, genocide-committing piece of shit who deserves a Happy Gland Band song to be written about him. With much vulgarity.
I quoted from Inga Muscio’s Autobiography of A Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society liberally in writing the lyrics for this song:
We all know the story
We know what we’ve been told
Columbus, he was brave and smart and worth his weight in gold
But here is something I didn’t know
I wasn’t taught back in the day
It was quite a revelation to learn
To hear somebody say
Columbus was an asshole
A wholesale piece of shit*
This holiday’s a total sham
Let’s do away with it
Imagine your nine year old daughter
Sold as a sex slave**
What a fine thing to celebrate
This Columbus Day
S—Hey Jared—you know what I feel like doing this October 13?
J—What’s that, Sage?
S—Oh, you know, just getting in on a little US-Government-sanctioned celebration of someone who raped, murdered, and started a pattern of genocide of indigenous people that we’ve kept up over the past five hundred years.
J—You don’t mean Columbus, do you?!? I thought everyone loved Columbus!
S—Well, in 2011, Venezuelans tore down a huge statue of him and renamed Columbus Day, “The Day of Indigenous Resistance.”*
J—But that’s in Venezuela!
S—Actually, the Seattle school board just voted to rename Columbus Day “Indigenous Peoples Day.”***
Columbus was an asshole
A wholesale piece of shit*
This holiday’s a total sham
Let’s do away with it
Imagine you tried to escape him
And were fed to a dog the next day**
What a fine thing to celebrate
This Columbus Day
J—But Sage, Columbus Day has been a treasured family tradition for hundreds of years!
S—Actually, the Knights of Columbus, an all-male Catholic organization, convinced FDR to make it a national holiday back in the 1930s.**
J—But Sage, Columbus opened the door to a whole new world!
S—Yeah, for the Europeans who were interested in totally dominating the people who had lived here for 14,000 years.**
J—So Columbus Day is really just a bunch of white supremacist bullshit!
S—Now you’ve got it!
Columbus’s filthy white supremacist boots*
Never touched dirt we now call American*
So can somebody tell me why we here in the USA
Are honoring his memory today?
Columbus was an asshole
A wholesale piece of shit*
This holiday’s a total sham
Let’s do away with it
Imagine an entire nation
Worked, diseased to death*
In the words of Inga Muscio:
Fuck Columbus Day*
*quoted or paraphrased from the first chapter of Inga Musico’s really excellent book which you should totally read now, Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society
**paraphrased/sourced from The Oatmeal’s Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy was not)
***source: The Colbert Report on Columbus Day
For your interest:
http://earlyamericanists.com/2013/10/23/whattheoatmealmissed/
You can buy this song here, if you think that’s what you might be into.
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