Ed. note: Agent Shrub, having caught the Roots Bug, has traced his lineage back to the 15th century. We reproduce here some press reports credited to his ancestor, one Jorge Arbushto, a journalist accredited to the Royal Court of Spain.
Jorge Arbushto reports from the capital:
An organization of Madrid slum dwellers complained today that the 1479 merger of Aragon and Castile had encouraged corporate raiders to further exploit the poor and to expand their allegedly rapacious activities further afield. Referring to the Royal promise to Christopher Columbus of ten percent of any trade resulting from his voyages, a slum spokesman said Aragon and Castile should be renamed Arrogant and Go Steal. Royal Press Spokesman Rodrigo Fitzwater responded that the slum dwellers should realize their financial woes are caused by Jewish control of the banks, and that the wealth from free trade will trickle down. Queen Isabella says she will press for funding for Columbus’ proposal to bring Western Civilization to the East. The Queen said there will be no new taxes, promising to find funds elsewhere. She said she will immediately commission an Inquisition into the funding question.
Opposition to the voyages has come from some members of the Talavera Commission, who charge that Columbus’ proposed new route to the East will throttle those who believe in the old routes, forcing them to remain silent in the face of new Navigationally Correct orthodoxies that will prevent new generations of students from studying the classics. But supporters of the Enterprise counter that the doubters suffer from malaise and Crusade Syndrome, and that Spain needs a new and weaker adversary immediately in order to once again stand tall. One dissenter decried this analysis as an attack on the vertically disadvantaged. He was denied tenure.
Christopher Columbus and the crew of the Enterprise set sail for Japan and any islands in between today. At a dockside photo opportunity, the captain told the press, “This is our mission: to seek out new worlds and new world orders, to expand the Spanish sphere of influence, to make the World Safe for Christianity, and to put an end to pre-Columbian artifacts.” Some have protested that the proposed voyage is a fraud, a sort of conquest, and could result in not only a war against the indigenous peoples of new lands but also the destruction of Africa through the removal of millions of her people to slave societies to the west. But a recent poll shows 58 percent of the Spanish people are more concerned with gold and spices than with the fine points of a decade-old philosophical debate.
Jorge Arbushto reporting from Cuba: Christopher Columbus continues to maintain that Cuba is the same as Japan, and that even if it is not, both lands are offshore islands full of infidel terrorists, and either one would constitute “a fine distraction from future domestic woes of the citizenry and “a logical focus for communal frustrations and arms industriousness on the part of our noble successors.”
Day 309 of America Held Hostage: Christopher Columbus held a press conference in the Bahamas today and declared the New World Order at hand. Rumors continue to circulate that Columbus altered ship’s logs to give himself credit for sighting land first, but his defenders say he is a national hero, it’s a dangerous world out there, and sometimes you have to go above the written log. Asked by a reporter for a small left-wing Turkish-funded monthly about charges that he had fomented genocide, the Captain conceded that his arrival in these lands had resulted in some collateralizing, noting that “unfortunately, we had to destroy the hemisphere in order to discover it.” At the urging of Ferdinand and Isabella, Pope Alexander VI has drawn a line of demarcation just west of the Azores, separating the spheres of influence of Spain and Portugal. No sooner did the United Papal Service deliver the Bull than Portugal’s King John, acting on a tip that Brazil was about to be discovered, moved to push the line over a thousand miles west. The Brazilians declined to comment until being discovered.