Tag Archives: American revolution

Dandy

Dandy: (n) a man who is excessively concerned about his clothes and appearance; a fop.

I’m a Yankee Doodle one.

Yes, the British soldiers were so intent on getting under the skin of the American Revolutionists that they accused them of being gay.

That was it.

This the whole meaning of the Yankee Doodle song.

In 1776, a dandy was a man who over-dressed, stuck feathers in his hat—which was a style in France known as macaroni—and was so prissy that every woman, upon encountering him, gave up on any possibility of a night of pleasure.

So what did the Americans do?

Did they go in a corner and cry?

Did they punch people in the nose and throw a fit? (Or maybe throw a fit and punch people in the nose.)

Did they curse? Did they swear?

No. They didn’t even claim they weren’t gay.

They just decided to use the song as a rallying cry for the cause, which certainly must have made the British dandies awfully angry.

When I was a kid, the worst thing you could call someone was “a fag.”  But I will tell you—the kids who survived such ignorance are the ones who didn’t throw a fit, but instead, made fun of their attackers. 

I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy

A Yankee Doodle do or die.

Yankee Doodle went to town

Riding on a pony

Stuck a feather in his hat

And called it macaroni.

You’ll never get people to stop being bigoted and offering lame attempts at humor to punctuate their prejudice.

You do have the power, though, to absorb their attacks, and turn them into your new marching song.

 

Civil War

Civil war: (n) a war between citizens of the same country.

If you know something is right, the best way to live is to go ahead and do it. Putting things off that we know are inevitable just makes us look stupid in the long run.

When the politicians involved in the American Revolution got together to form a Constitution, all of them, in their own ways, knew that slavery was wrong.

Some didn’t care.

Some believed it was more right than wrong.

But the main authors of the Constitution, from Madison on down, were fully cognizant that it was absolutely ridiculous to think that one man could own another
man. Matter of fact, they constantly lamented to one another that they “wished there was more they could do.”

It was their habit to free all of their slaves upon their death. So from 1776 until 1860–a span of eighty-four years–there was an ongoing debate about whether anything of significance could be done to curtail slave trading in the United States of America.

Laws were passed and ridiculous compromises achieved, but in the final fifteen years leading up to the American Civil War, it was obvious to most deeper-thinking Americans that this issue was going to lead to a battlefield where blood was shed.

It doesn’t make any difference if you’re talking about conflicts between a man and a woman, arguments within a family, or in the case of the United States, an open, seething contradiction, stinking right under our noses.

The longer you put something off, the more intense the division and painful the solution.

The Civil War could have been stopped when we started the nation.

It’s just too bad that the forefathers were more concerned about the right to bear arms than about the eternal need to free the slaves.

 

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