Topic A : A Different Spin on the World Around Us : One Wrong Turn . . .

While everyone else is loving or loathing this Quincentenary Day, suppose, just suppose, that instead of stopping off in the Western Hemisphere, Columbus had followed Marco Polo as planned and sailed all the way to China.

Forgetting for a moment the effect on Asia (chow mein pizza?), what would our world be like?

There would be no Columbus Day, of course. Which matters little to the city of Berkeley, which has renamed the occasion Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

There would be no Columbus, Ohio, or Columbus, Ind. Heavens, there wouldn’t even be an Indiana, since the name Indians comes from Columbus’ navigational miscue.

Around here, there would be no Columbus Day Debacle--which has so embarrassed the local Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Foundation and will ultimately cost somebody $69,000.

That’s how much was spent before the private foundation canceled this year’s Columbus Day-to-end-all-Columbus Days. Plans floated in 1990 to sail replicas of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria into Long Beach and other ports were dead in the water by June.

That’s when Spain, which financed Columbus’ voyages back in 1492, decided there weren’t enough jewels in the realm to finance another expedition, which, with inflation, would now cost $850,000.

Los Angeles County wants Mother Spain to pay off the debts. But, as things stand, this is unlikely.

There will also be no celebration at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. Just a “commemoration,” says a museum spokeswoman, because “not everybody benefited from Columbus’ voyage.”

Indeed. Critics contend that Columbus is responsible for as many deaths as AIDS and World War II combined. And that’s beyond the immediate raping and pillaging that went on when he and his men (no women) arrived.

But enough of the white male bashing. After all, they didn’t mean to bring measles, pox and VD to the New World. Did they?

Certainly not, says former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, apologist for Nixon, Reagan and, now, Columbus.

According to a preview of Simon’s Columbus Day address at New York’s Adelphi University, “The heritage of Columbus has been lost in a miasma of revisionist critiques and strident denunciations . . . (by) partisan ideologues trying to rewrite history.”

Other pro-Columbians remind us that if he hadn’t landed here, we’d have no horses. Or sugar. (Columbus delivered that little treat on his second voyage to the Americas.)

Of course, the sugar pretty much killed off the early Indians because it took most of them and most of their waking hours to harvest this “enslaving crop” for their “conquerors,” according to those cynical Smithsonian historians.

Still, 500 years later, there is something we all can celebrate: Columbus--explorer or exploiter--got us another day off.