WHALE or HO

I am thoroughly enjoying my time in Nantucket. You do not get much of a sense of phoniness up here. Most of the people are a little impressed with their history but then again they do have a lot of history that is well...historic. One thing that is quite pervasive is their pride in their WHALING industry. They killed a lot of whales to get the oil. There is a Whaling Museum and the local school teams are known as The Whalers. (no relation to Bob Marley's Wailers.) All well and good. I am not one of those revisionist people who have to rewrite all the text books to remove things from our past history that are not politically correct (PC) today. You know that there are lots of folks who prefer to think of Christopher Columbus not as the discoverer of the New World but rather the raper and pillager of indigenous peoples. These same people condemn everyone south of the Mason Dixon line who might want to belong to a historic group related to the Civil War. Many of these phony revisionists are residents of the great state of Massachusetts and some have even held political office.

To them I say phooey! Whaling was a very important part of the history of Nantucket. It was back in the days when we needed oil to light lamps as petroleum was not available (the same people who hate Columbus also hate petroleum) and rather than sit in the dark, they killed whales. Today we are more enlightened. Now we only kill people in far away countries. Anyhow, I am in favor of not rewriting history to suit the sensibilities of tree huggers and hippies and calling Columbus anything but the discoverer of America, the South as an equal part of the USA, and Whaling as something we used to do before we got PC, except in Japan where they still kill whales for whatever reason...probably to make aphrodisiacs.