1776

Anyone ever read any David McCullough? I just read his book “1776”. I am partial to Mr. McCullough because I really enjoyed his biography on Harry Truman. From the couple of history books I have read in my short and brutish life I find his words the most accessible.

So this book deals with the beginning of the revolutionary war of the USA against the Evil Empire. It does not deal with the whole war, but only with the events from the siege of Boston, to the evacuation of New York to the battle at Trenton at the end of 1776. Mr. McCullough is a very popular describer of American History, he does it in a fresh and nicely disguised patriotic manner. You don’t even realize his bias, which is fine, since he probably does not either. Those brave Americans always faced the greatest odds, had the worst equipment and the most gallant of them all was his Excellency, Mr. Washington - God’s humblest servant - a man made of benevolent granite whose only foible was the correct construction of his home. If Mr. McCullough were British his work would unleash a physical revision of history.

I ate it up, there is nothing that gets me going like a well-rounded heroic epic of underdogs making good. But let’s just say we take all of the odds that the American revolution faced in that first fateful year at face value. What the reader must conclude then is that America is a nation born of war. With little means to defend what it thought to be its inalienable rights, with few men to stand up to the greatest army in the world, with even less equipment for those men, with no money to pay the peasantry so called to arms and with military leaders that surely had no clue as to the intricacies of killing and maiming as many of their opponents as possible. It is utterly beyond me how the Brits didn’t just absolutely massacre the Americans in a really short amount of time. The situation was so bad that at the end of the fighting season of 1776 there must have been somewhere upward of 40.000 redcoats around New York State and roughly 7000 American Soldiers, most of which had no shoes and the rest was sick to death, hungry, hadn’t been paid in months and shouldn’t even have been called a militia. So here is a collection of peasants with no protection against New England winters, no bullets, no intelligence (as in spying) and no leaders yet still they manage to somehow hang on. And in the end they triumph over what was supposedly the greatest army of all times.

This helps me realize why this country is the most secure in the history of humanity, yet the most insecure in its own mind (Chomsky). It was born form war, and it sucked at it. This hasn’t changed much over the last couple - three hundred years. The USA still likes to go to war, and she still sucks at it. The intelligence in both spying and plain strategic brainpower is still horrible. Mr. Washington had no clue what the Brits were doing, and neither do the modern Armed Forces. Usually we, the population, need to give our representatives and military leaders quite some times to get knocked about a bit in order to learn the lay of the land. And even then it is not to be taken for granted that all that firepower will guarantee a victory over those originally proclaimed to be easy prey bad guys. Don’t get me wrong, nobody is as excitable as my current country men when they think a good cause is on the horizon. They are just a little stupid when it comes to understanding who is holding that good cause up, and to what end. So in order to make up for sucking at fighting and strategery this country shoots up steroids like Roger Clemens. Rightly, they figure that if they can not compete in skill and motivation they at least can be twice as big as the other guy. Which of course only works a little bit, because if you are not good at kicking ass, and primarily rely on being grossly large, there remains the thought that there always is a bigger dude out there somewhere. Hence the perceived insecurity.

So lest you wonder why the USA is so easily aroused, consider that she was a child of war, like the last two generations of Afghanis, and that seemingly every weakness and strength of character and skill can be traced back to the Revolutionary War.