Look What You Did, Cristopher!

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, 
Someone sailed the ocean blue. 
Somebody borrowed the fare in Spain 
For a business trip on the bounding main, 
And to prove to the people, by actual test, 
You could get to the East by sailing West. 
Somebody said, Sail on! Sail on! 
And studied China and China's lingo, 
And cried from the bow, There's China now! 
And promptly bumped into San Domingo. 
Somebody murmured, Oh dear, oh dear! 
I've discovered the Western Hemisphere.

And that, you may think, my friends, was that. 
But it wasn't. Not by a fireman's hat. 
Well enough wasn't left alone, 
And Columbus was only a cornerstone. 
There came the Spaniards, 
There came the Greeks, 
There came the Pilgrims in leather breeks. 
There came the Dutch, 
And the Poles and Swedes, 
The Persians, too, 
And perhaps the Medes, 
The Letts, the Lapps, and the Lithuanians, 
Regal Russians, and ripe Roumanians. 
There came the French 
And there came the Finns, 
And the Japanese 
With their formal grins. 
The Tartars came, 
And the Terrible Turks - 
In a word, humanity shot the works. 
And the country that should have been Cathay 
Decided to be 
The U.S.A.

And that, you may think, my friends, was that. 
But it wasn't. Not by a fireman's hat. 
Christopher C. was the cornerstone, 
And well enough wasn't left alone. 
For those who followed 
When he was through, 
They burned to discover something, too. 
Somebody, bored with rural scenery, 
Went to work and invented machinery, 
While a couple of other mental giants 
Got together 
And thought up Science. 
Platinum blondes 
(They were once peroxide), 
Peruvian bonds 
And carbon monoxide, 
Tax evaders 
And Vitamin A, 
Vice crusaders, 
And tattletale gray - 
These, with many another phobia, 
We owe to that famous Twelfth of Octobia. 
O misery, misery, mumble and moan! 
Someone invented the telephone, 
And interrupted a nation's slumbers, 
Ringing wrong but similar numbers. 
Someone devised the silver screen 
And the intimate Hollywood magazine, 
And life is a Hades 
Of clicking cameras, 
And foreign ladies 
Behaving amorous. 
Gags have erased 
Amusing dialog, 
As gas has replaced 
The crackling firelog. 
All that glitters is sold as gold, 
And our daily diet grows odder and odder, 
And breakfast foods are dusty and cold - 
It's a wise child 
That knows its fodder. 
Someone invented the automobile, 
And good Americans took the wheel 
To view American rivers and rills 
And justly famous forests and hills - 
But someone equally enterprising 
Had invented billboard advertising. 
You linger at home 
In dark despair, 
And wistfully try the electric air. 
You hope against hope for a quiz imperial, 
And what do they give you? 
A doctor serial. 
Oh, Columbus was only a cornerstone, 
And well enough wasn't left alone, 
For the Inquisition was less tyrannical 
Than the iron rules of an age mechanical, 
Which, because of an error in '92, 
Are clamped like corsets on me and you, 
While Children of Nature we'd be today 
If San Domingo 
Had been Cathay.

And that, you may think, my friends, is that. 
But it isn't - not by a fireman's hat. 
The American people, 
With grins jocose, 
Always survive the fatal dose. 
And though our systems are slightly wobbly, 
We'll fool the doctor this time, probly.