Ya know, back in my day it was a popular liberal educational theme to emphasize the battle for personal rights and freedoms that prompted men to leave their jobs and go fight the British at Bunker Hill, Breed's Hill, Lexington, and on down the East Coast to Monmouth and finally Yorktown.

What was emphasized in my sleepy little education was that there were many men who died from Hessian lead and British cannon, and who took the risk of doing so because the notion of freedom was compelling; this is the idealism that fueled the most liberal principles in the Bill of Rights, without which the various States could not agree on a basis for federation.

Remember that? I remember being very happy that this passage was made, this battle essentially won, so far back, and believed I could see the benefits of this legacy at work all around me.

Looking back today, I can see I was naive, and can only plead youthful idealism. It turns out that the jaded realpolitik and the meat-head cynics, and the militaristic authoritarians, were not subdued, neither there nor at Normandy and Leningrad.

Where is Admiral de Grasse when you need him???*

I am seriously losing patience with these assholes.


A


The French Admiral who sailed up from Haiti with 28 French warships in September, 1781, and blockaded the James River and the Chesapeake Bay, preventing any British escape from Yorktown, and guaranteeing Cornwallis' capitulation in early October.