Oh beautiful for baseball games

For happy days of golf

For tennis too if that’s for you ,

My TV’s never off.

We like our sports vicariously

We sit us down and root

And if we end victoriously

We hoist a Bud to salute.

(America, America, that wasn’t the pioneers’ way

They weren’t no couch potatoes

The game they played was the Indian raid

Where the winner scalped all the spectators.)

Americans, Americans,

Throw your remotes away

Get off your duffs and strut your stuff

And melt the fat away!

(When it disappears from between your ears

Now that’ll be an Independence Day.)

THE DEFAMATION OF INDEPENDENCE

July Fourth is here again and patriotism is busting out all over. My own is overflowing as you can see from the verse above, bursting with good advice for all and sundry. To stimulate it further I did some skimming in a book I’ve read already, but which has always been worth another look. It’s about the Revolution and it’s called “Those Damned Rebels.” The writer is named Michael Pearson and he examines things from the “British point of view.” This means that he makes it clear that he regards the Americans who dissed the Empire at that time as pretty much a gang of stinkers who would have gotten a jolly good thrashing if people like himself had been in charge of things.

This doesn’t fit in very well with the Brits erecting a statue of George Washington in London or graciously accepting our help in two world wars lest they be overrun by the Germans, but he’s entitled to his opinion, no doubt. Probably he believes America would have been even more useful to Britain if it had continued as a colony, but he can’t prove that, and the actual facts of the Twentieth Century don’t support his case.

He’s not obnoxious, just doesn’t venerate us as much as most historians and can be annoying at times with things like calling the Massachusetts Minute Men at Lexington and Concord “gunmen.” That means they were guerrillas not on his side. When on one’s side they’re not gunmen, but “patriots”, “freedom fighters”, “partisans”, “Maquis”, “irregulars”, “the resistance”, and so on. Definitely not “terrorists” or “assassins”. Not users of “sneaky tactics” either as Pearson avers about the Colonials.

One story in the book is worth more than all the battle pieces and strategic analysis it contains. It’s about the battle of Saratoga in 1777 and the plight of the Baroness Von Riedesel, the young wife of a Hessian general leading a brigade attached to the British army. Wives went to war with their husbands in those days, and in her case brought their three young children along too. The British were falling back late in the fight and the baroness found herself in charge of things in the cellar of a house full of wounded men on whom the army surgeons were working as best they could. Water was in great demand for young and old, but any soldier who tried to get it was in danger of death.

As the book says “At last, one of the soldiers’ wives offered to take the buckets down to the water, insisting the rebels would not kill a woman. With great courage, she walked to the river, but she was right -- they did not open fire on her.”

Hurray for our side. We did the right thing. Goes a good way to justify celebrating the Fourth. Where are my firecrackers?