Alexandra Fulin Baldwin
Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- We have some pretty random stuff this week, collected during the moments this week when Alex wasn’t using “rich lawyer” as a pejorative or “taxsplain” as foreplay… We’ll start with some restaurant history, courtesy of Daryl’s never-ending interest in Boston. Then we will explore reasons to avoid One World Government Death Cults, discuss holding grudges and reasons that I am a terrible person before moving onto a couple of people who insist on gendering their dogs. Finally, some history, where you learn where my fake name came from, and why Baldwin IV was the coolest Baldwin brother, by a long shot. And then, Kanye, bitches... Submitted by: Daryl What is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the country...and have you ever eaten there? Well, Daryl, I am glad you asked...let’s do some restaurant history! In Newport, RI there is a restaurant called The White Horse Tavern that first opened as a tavern in...wait for it...1673! For 100 years, it served as a restaurant, tavern and the meeting house for the Rhode Island Colonial General Assembly, Criminal Court and City Council. In 1702, notorious pirate William Mayes, Jr. succeeded his father as innkeeper, protected by the townspeople and causing much embarrassment to officials of the British Colony. The tavern acquired its current name in 1730, and things got a little awkward in 1776 when the innkeeper moved his family out rather than live with the Hessian mercenaries forced upon him by the Brits...but then he came back after the war and all was cool for another 100 or so years. In 1895, the family sold the Inn and it became more of a rooming house and apparently stopped selling food. Yada, yada yada, by 1954 the structure was nearly condemned until it was purchased by a public trust, restored and re-opened as a restaurant. That makes it the oldest...but not continuously operating...restaurant in America. In 1762, on the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets in lower Manhattan, Samuel Fraunces opened a tavern in his newly acquired home. A favorite haunt of the Sons of Liberty, this served as the staging point of a raid by Patriots, dressed as Indians, to dump tea into the harbor in protest of the tea acts...in 1765 (8 years before the much more famous Boston Tea Party). It also served as the location, on December 4, 1783, of General George Washington’s farewell feast for the officers of the Continental Army, and then as the offices of the Departments of Foreign Affairs, War and Finance before the national capital moved to Philadelphia. The building then changed hands, had some fires, was renovated, added to and redesigned so much that no one knows exactly what it looked like in Colonial times anymore. There seems to have been a restaurant there for most of its history, but it has moved around within the building and so has not operated continuously. The building was rescued through a gift from the Grandson of Benjamin Tallmadge in 1904 and became the museum that it remains today. Pretty noteworthy: FALN (Armed Forces for the Liberation of Puerto Rico) set off a bomb at Fraunces Tavern in 1975, killing four people before FALN’s leaders eventually earned a whole bunch of pardons from Bill Clinton and at least one commutation from Barack Obama. I guess we are just letting bygones be bygones... Back to the question, and moving forward to 1776 and north to Essex, CT, we get to the Griswold Inn. Founded by three brothers, and having been run by only six families since then, the Inn has operated a restaurant or taproom or other similar dining facility ever since. I’m going to dock them some serious points for being a central point of the temperance movement before prohibition, though, and for operating as a liquor-free establishment even when they didn’t have to. Thankfully, they have come to their senses... All of which brings us to Boston’s Union Oyster House, operating as a stand-alone restaurant in its current location continuously since 1826. It is only sort of a tourist trap (you should go if you’re in Boston) and yes, I have eaten there on numerous occasions. One special bonus? Along with Doyle’s in Jamaica Plain and a couple other old Boston haunts, the Oyster House is on the Boston Beer Company’s short list of test locations, so they often have a bunch of Sam Adams products that are unavailable anywhere else. And you can sometimes get Sam Summer even in the Winter! (Spoiler alert: it’s not as good.) Known mostly for its famous diners, including anyone who ever mattered in Massachusetts politics, the most interesting patron was probably Louis Phillippe, exiled king of France, who lived on the second floor and taught French lessons for some part of the four years he spent in the United States, and may be responsible for the name of the town of Orleans on Cape Cod (the town split from Eastham during his visit, and the name is possibly in tribute). Also possessor of the single greatest pickup line in the history of maleness: “Hey. I’m the exiled King of France. You want a French lesson?” Funny thing about the Oyster House, though, is that it is within spitting distance of the Bell in Hand (est. 1795) and the Green Dragon (1654 - of Paul Revere fame). Neither of those is in its original location, although the Bell in Hand moved just across the street and still has its original bar, while the Dragon has bounced around a lot more and isn’t necessarily related to the original. The point, though, is that there are some really old bars in Boston... Submitted by: Kane lives in Death Alex, why haven’t you joined the Brotherhood of Nod? Because I am an atheist. I don’t believe in fairy tales, regardless of whether you call them God, Krishna, Allah or Kane. I mean, c’mon...this guy claims that he came to Earth from some unknown planet 8,000 years ago to raise humanity out of its pre-civilized state? That sounds an awful lot like Dianetics to me, L. Ron. And if he was so intent on leading humans to the enlightened promised land, why’d he go fucking around with Joseph Stalin for 20 years? Like the Masons and the Illuminati, the Brotherhood was way cooler when it was still a secret society. Once the Masons started running ads on the radio, it became just a bunch of real estate agents trying to drum up business, and once the Brotherhood came out of hiding, it was just another Progressive super government wannabe that thought it was the only group really enlightened enough to rule the world. Sure, it was cool when they dismantled the UN Global Defense Initiative, but they didn’t restore humanity to its Nation States and local rule, they just replaced the GDI with a whole other Unified Government, this one secular and more fanatical. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And let this be a lesson to you, Gamers...whenever a government tells you that you need to cede power, freedoms and control so that it can “keep you safe”, you need to be extremely suspicious. This is true in video games, it was true of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, it is true in Harry Potter, and it will remain true for the rest of human history. Government is not you friend, especially when it says that it is! Submitted by: Cookie Monster Is there an accepted amount of time to pass before one should absolutely let bygones be bygones? At work the other day, im in backseat of passenger van,at the door. It's 12°F and wind is blowing. It's colder than the Head Nun's heart,who was boss of where i attended middle school and got my ass whipped regularly,but i digress. So i l look out window and see a couple of civilians freezing and i recognize one that had been a real bastard when he was in uniform and treated is underlings quite shabbily. That was 15 yrs ago. I started to open door to offer shelter but then thought,"fuck that bastard" and continued savoring the warmth of van heater. Is 15 yrs too soon yet to let bygones be bygones? This is the second time in this column that bygones have come up, which brings up an interesting question...can bygones do anything other than be allowed to be bygones? I’m not sure it has any other use in the English language. No one ever talks about “reliving all of those great bygones”... Anyway, if we go by the standard set above, then yes, I think it is time to move on. I mean, if the statute of bygones for murder is somewhere between 23 and 30 years, then the statute on being a real bastard has to be shorter than 15 right? Like maybe 3-5 years, unless there was physical violence involved? However, as we have all established, I am a bitch, and I can hold a grudge like no one’s business. I have some family members who can vouch for that, and you can find a couple of former online friends who will probably willingly testify to my bitchiness. Of course, if they do, I will remind you that they are, alternately; a member of a cult, raising the baby their wife had with another man, or a chick with a mustache...oops. A couple of cousins and aunts “borrowed” some money from my little sister about 13 years ago and I haven’t spoken to most of them since. One called me once to ask if I could help her get a job (she knew that my best friend worked in a hospital she was applying for a job at) and I told her to fuck off. Not figuratively, I mean I actually used the words “Fuck off”. So, really, I encourage you to hold onto that grudge for as long as you’d like! In my defense, two of those family members apologized, returned what they could and seemed legitimately contrite...I forgave them, sort of. I’m not totally opposed to second chances. But I don’t give them out automatically. I, therefore, support your grudge-holding. I wouldn’t necessarily wish bad things to happen to the person...actually, who am I kidding, of course I would! Actual things that I have thought at some point in my life:
What can I say? I’m not nice. Submitted by: WhiteLiar Alex, I have a girl dog, but she's got a deep, loud bark and I tell her she sounds like a boy dog. Will my misgendering her bark do lasting no damage to her psyche? Submitted by: Lady Catherine My girl dog pees on poles. Should I remind her that she is a girl dog or will that do lasting damage to her little psyche? How dare you, the both of you, try and assign a gender to your dogs. You have literally no idea what they are going through or how they identify. You think just because she has 8 teats and no red rocket that she’s automatically a girl? Do you even gender identity?!? Next thing you will be trying to tell me that she can pee on any fire hydrants she wants, even if that means that big, hairy male Wolfhounds are peeing right next to little French Poodle puppies! You are both monsters. MONSTERS. Like, literally, you’re worse than Hitler. I can’t even with you two… I applaud you both for worrying about your dogs’ psyche...canine mental health is one of America’s great under-reported social threats. Without actually checking any data, I am going to assume that it is the #1 cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, and was directly responsible for roughly 80% of the atmospheric carbon added in the last two years. (The stressed dogs eat more legumes, they get gassier...it is a complicated ecosystem). What I simply can’t abide is your insistence that your female dogs are either a) female, or b) dogs. There are literally thousands of genders, and your dog could be any one of them. Sure, it could be a female, but it could also be a male, a subcontinental Hijra, a femme, transsexual, queen, sissy, pangender, agender, bigender, androgyne...you should be appropriately shamed at this point, so I won’t go on. But that isn’t even the worst of it. Earth is populated with millions of species, and just because your companion comes in a body that looks like a dog doesn’t mean it is dog. In fact, it could be a ladybug, or a blue-spotted stingray or even an Asian Royal Fern. Most alarming? It could be a human, which means that by owning the dog, or really any pet, you are literally owning another human being and its offspring. That’s right, all pet owners are basically the same as slaveholders. So, yea, you think I was kidding about the Hitler comment? No way… Submitted by: Simon Which Baldwins are decent? None of us. We are all pretty terrible people. Actually, you know who was decent? Baldwin IV, the Leper King of Jerusalem (TrueFact: Alexander the Great, the Emperor Fulin and Baldwin IV...put them together and you get my name...get it?). So, first of all, major bummer, Baldwin was born with leprosy in 1161, which totally sucked. Or, maybe he acquired it at a young age...it’s hard to tell. He also acquired the throne at a young age, 13, and the mother of all enemies, legendary medieval battle commander and Muslim leader Saladin. In 1177, Saladin, fresh off ruining a bunch of Europe’s great armies in their ill-conceived crusades to the Holy Land, set his sights on Jerusalem and its child king. Baldwin, though, was no flappy-skinned child...in fact, he was pretty well prepared for this. Using the education acquired from the Archbishop of Tyne (one of the eras great intellects), Baldwin raised an army, solicited the help of the Knights Templar, organized the defenses of the city and beat back Saladin’s Army. {Longer version: he and the Templars were both so badly outmaneuvered by Saladin into a seemingly impossible position that the Muslim commander totally lost track of him and Baldwin’s cavalry caught Saladin’s Army by surprise at Montgisard and decimated the battle-hardened 26,000 man force so thoroughly as to force Saladin and the remnant of his force all the way back to Egypt. It was the worst military defeat of Saladin’s life.} For this, 15 year old Baldwin became a hero of his people, defender of Christendom and inspiration to everyone born with Leprosy, I guess. {Epilogue: the real hero of this story is probably Saladin, who regrouped in Egypt, returned with another army, defeated Baldwin In several places, destroyed several Templar strongholds and forced Baldwin to ask for peace. He then won a whole bunch of wars against different Crusaders, conquered almost the entire modern Middle East and finally, in 1187. Then Richard the Lionheart showed up and kinda beat the shit out of Saladin, although he offered to stop if Saladin would agree that his brother convert to Christianity, marry Richard’s sister Joan and then the two of them take Jerusalem as a wedding gift.} ----------------- Alex’s random old song of the week For no reason at all, other than his super obnoxious personality sometimes causing us to forget that he is kinda awesome...Kanye and the horribly offensive, impossibly catchy Gold Digger.
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Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- Hey-ho everybody! Crazy week at work, but I was totally burned out by yesterday afternoon, so I stopped doing actual work and I have been writing furiously for your entertainment ever since. I will thank myself on your behalf. I had a lot more questions than I had time, so I have a handful in the queue for next week already...I didn’t forget them, I will get to them! Daryl is back this week, after a long absence! I am also going to tackle some Tootsie Pop Technicalities for MrsFiveO, leading to one of the Internets great rabbit holes, and then provide some grading advice to the divine ST. That, by the way, does not stand for Secret Teacher, but I feel like it could, and maybe should, so it does from now on! Proper Opinion is handicapping a fight between giant, possibly-inflated corporate mascots, Aggierican has a question that can only be answered by Tweetstorm and Puter is flirting with Mo some more!!! Enjoy! Submitted by: Daryl What was the first city in the country to have a paid police force? I believe that it was Broward County, FL, and they have been setting the standards for world class, cutting edge law enforcement ever since! As with every question Daryl ever asks;-), the answer is Boston! The first City-funded Day watch (full time police force) was created in 1838 and was followed by every major city in America over the next 20 or so years (New York 1845, Chicago 1851, Philadelphia 1855). Early records are spotty, but my guess is that the original force was made up mostly of guys named Fitzy, Sully and Murph. Most of their brothers and cousins were with the Fire, and the bulk of their work included arresting other guys named Fitzy, Sully and Murph for being drunk in public and harassing the gays in the St. Paddy’s Day parade. I joke but there is some interesting Irish-American history here. The first Irish-born police officer, Bernard “Benny” McGinniskin was appointed by Mayor Benjamin Seaver in the early 1850’s, creating significant controversy in the city. After Seaver retired to star in the 1980’s Sitcom Growing Pains, the City Marshal, Francis Tukey, tried to fire McGinniskin on the grounds that it represented an immigrant taking the job of an American. After some criticism in the press, Tukey reinstated the officer, only to fire him again in 1854 during the anti-Irish groundswell of the No-Nothing party. It’s unclear at exactly which point the rules were changed so that only Irishmen were allowed to be officers... Boston was one of the first U.S. police departments to integrate, hiring Horatio Julius Homer in 1878 (a little bit oddly, it appears that New Orleans had the earliest fully-integrated police force). Washington DC appears to have been first, hiring an administrative officer in 1861, and Chicago hired its first black officer in 1871, although the CPD didn’t hire a uniformed black officer until the 1940’s. This, however, hasn’t put any kind of a damper on the CPD’s habit of terrorizing its black constituents...so they still have that going for them... Submitted by:MrsFiveO How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop? Thrrreee!!! Deeper scientific research shows that the answer is somewhere between 144 and 481 licks. My own research has shown that there are some things that will pop with a lot fewer licks than that, provided the licker knows what he or she is doing… Much better question, though, is “Why are you eating Tootsie Pops?”, which are kind of a garbage candy. I have no problem with Tootsie rolls, which are pretty delicious, or with lollipops (meh)...but I don’t see what the purpose of combining the two is. The whole is less than the sum of the two parts. Part of this is that the construction sucks: the pop is never of a thickness that is consistent enough that sucking on it will reach the Tootsie roll center evenly, so you end up sucking on Tootsie roll while you try and get the last bits of the lollipop dissolved. I'm totally changing subjects, though, because I've started working through the “Up Next” videos on the old Tootsie Roll commercial, and while wholly unrelated to Tootsie Rolls, they are absolutely phenomenal! Just take a quick gander:
That is, frankly, a YouTube rabbit hole that I am really surprised I managed to get out of at all...and I wish you Godspeed in your efforts for the rest of the day. Submitted by: ST I want to know what kind of stickers to purchase to put on my students' assessments One of the great dangers to today’s youth is the continuous decline of objective standards. We joke a lot about participation trophies and sports without scores...but the bigger, more insipid threat is rampant grade inflation. Kids have learned that they can earn A’s if they merely complain loud enough, and their parents too often support their bitching by pressuring teachers to award better marks than the kids deserve. And this goes from high school all the way into college, where elite universities have simply stopped trying to tell kids that they aren’t perfect. There was some consternation a number of years ago when word leaked that over 90% of Harvard Students graduate with honors, and that the median grade is A-. Yale promises that honors will be limited to the top 30% of the class, but seems to give them out to more like 55%, which seems to be in line with most of the Ivies. (Contrast this to a school like MIT, which ends up with the smartest aggregate class of freshman in the world and then seems to ensure that every one of them fails something just to remind them that they aren’t as smart as they think they are! Which reminds me that the best way to annoy a Harvard alum is to tell them “Harvard? That’s a really good school...like, the second best school in Cambridge, right?”) I therefore feel like it is your duty to provide the children with entirely accurate feedback. Should the kids do very well, then by all means give them a gold star, or a smiley face, or a Paw Patrol thumbs up (OK, so your high school-aged students may not dig on the Zuma stickers), but you are going to need some stickers for the kids that just don’t quite measure up. Things like “Meh” and “Adequate” for the ones who aren’t worthy of praise, and then some passive-aggressive ones like “The World Needs Ditchdiggers, too” and “Don’t worry, science isn’t really for everyone” for the ones who really have no hope. Frankly, giving dumb kids the delusion that they can make a living from their brains isn’t really helping them. There are some times that you need to deliver some difficult truth that a sticker could make a little easier, like “Trying was a waste of your time” or “You could have played video games instead of studying and gotten the same F” or “Just Quit” or “I’m Sorry, You’re Awful. I’m Not Sorry.” Your job as teacher is to help them be the best they can be, right? But what if the best is really pretty shitty? If that’s the case, you at least want them to feel like they are living their best life when they finally land their ideal job as a custodian at Walmart or the guy who rounds up lost carriages in the parking lot at Big Y. And when he does, don’t you like the idea of chubby little Bobby Jenkins sitting back in his trailer and thinking…”You know what? Mrs. T saved me a lot of time with her honest assessment of my abilities. If I could operate a ball point pen, I would write her a Thank You note”? Then you will know that you really made a difference. Submitted by: Proper Opinion If they were the same size, who would win in a fight between the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Michelin Man? Bibendum vs. Poppin Fresh! The Corporate Mascot Battle of the Century! I see this as a battle between measurables and intangibles. Between the physical superiority of the Michelin Man and the grittiness and determination of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. The Michelin Man is obviously physically superio. First, he is a man, not a boy. He’s also got longer arms and legs, which should make him faster, more agile and capable of exploiting his reach advantage. Having hands and feet seems like kind of a big deal in this fight, too. And the ability not to giggle every time someone touches his stomach will probably go a long way. Further, his knowledge of travel and discerning taste in restaurants tell us that he is a worldly and sophisticated man, likely schooled in the arts of self-defense and hand-to-hand combat. So, on paper, this isn’t much of a battle at all. But battles aren’t won on paper, are they? They’re not contested in the cushy seats and cold, sterile analysis of the critics and the analysts. Battles are fought in the arena, soiled by the blood and sweat of the combatants, where the careful plans and sober strategies of the weak fall to the iron will of the strong. In the words of the great American poet Michael Gerard Tyson, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” And here’s where the Dough Boy is going to win this fight. Because the Michelin Man is French, and there isn’t a physical advantage that can change the fact that there is simply no way on God’s Green Earth that a Doughboy is losing a fight to a Frenchman. Not after 4 million of our boys boarded boats in 1917 to rescue those cheese-eating beret-wearers from the Kaiser’s evil clutches! America came of age in WWI, asserting its influence on the Global Stage, redrawing the European map and spreading the devastation of Spanish Flu to a whole hemisphere it otherwise might not have reached! (Fun fact: it is called Spanish Flu because wartime sensors in Germany, England, France and the US minimized the disease’s devastation to improve public morale, creating a false feeling that neutral Spain was particularly hard hit.) And it would be a goddamn insult to the memory of those veterans to even consider for a moment that some nancy-pants frog is going to stand up to the bald eagle and apple pie fueled, baguette-shredding power of American muscle! So, most likely, this fight starts with the Michelin Man bouncing around the ring, nibbling on a nice baked brie, showing his superior mobility and his likely stylish fight clothes. Then, after several seconds, someone shouts “Look, Germans!” and he immediately surrenders. Game over. Submitted by: Schaedenfreudelish Will the Twitternovelas ever stop? Why do people bother subtweeting? When will the idiocy end? C’mon, who doesn’t get s super tingly feeling when you see a Tweet that ends with “1/327”? Whether it is a weird sort of Rubio/Cruz romance fetish, some Game Theory, or a detailed look at the finer points of every single song The Beach Boys ever made, breaking out of the Twitter norm and writing an entire blog post in 280 character chunks is an art form that we should all appreciate. Sometimes, you just have SO MUCH to say, that you need more than 18 tweets to say it! Actually, let me put in a plug here, because if that happens, we’ll probably publish it for you at MisfitsPolitics.com, so you can send it to one of us and we will post it all in one piece for you:-). I’m super guilty of subtweeting, so I can’t really take anyone to task for that. Heck, I drop the equivalent of subtweets into this column regularly...like, you know, earlier in this answer! And I do think subtweets serve a purpose: they let the writer blow off a little steam without creating a needless direct confrontation. They can also be super effective because the person you are subtweeting must first admit that they a) care and b) think they are important enough to be subtweeted before they can respond. It’s quite the effective form of discourse! True story: a member of The Bitchley Club that I won’t name once blocked me over a subtweet that wasn’t even about him. In fact, I never followed him, he never followed me and we had never interacted before that, but one of their groupies does follow me, thought it was about him and forwarded it. That led to a handful of Tweets about why subtweets aren’t really so bad, and then blocking me. So, there you have another advantage of subtweets...you can sometimes get really annoying people into a tizzy totally by accident! That’s a downside, too, though...and on more than one occasion, I have scuttled a subtweet about one person because I realized that a whole separate person would take it entirely differently. Obviously, without saying who a tweet is aimed at, anyone can assume that it’s them. I have also had more than one instance of someone asking me privately “Was this about me?” and while it has thankfully never actually been about them, it kinda argues against subtweeting...so many I need to rethink this. As for the idiocy, it’s never ending. It’s the human condition. We have a LONG way to evolve, and right now the median person just isn’t very smart. Which, more than anything, speaks to the genius of the really smart people, because they’ve managed to not only keep 7 billion of us alive, but to dramatically improve the global standard of living despite the best efforts of the idiot masses to eat Tide Pods and elect reality stars as leaders. Here’s to the elites! Submitted by: The Gormogons (Puter) When is Mo going to replace the car antenna she snapped off my 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger and then beat me with? Get back in your corner, Puter, or I’ll show you what it means to REALLY be beaten with car parts. You don’t want me to prove to you that Mo is the nice one, do you? Don’t be fooled by my size, I will pistol whip a bitch if I need to (which, contrary to television, is not to be done with the butt of the gun but with the muzzle…), and I absolutely know people who will stab another human for less than $30… Honestly, just accept that you’re not going to get your antenna back. Take solace in the healing of your bruises and, if you’re lucky, your ego. Buy a new antenna (which you can find here for $16.82) and move on, forgetting that the unfortunate beating situation ever happened. I mean, if we are being really honest, you should probably take some pride in getting beaten by Mo...she doesn’t spend that much time on just anyone. I mean, certain American business interests pay her handsomely to beat the (figurative) crap out of people, and here she is doing it to you for free! Combine that with the energy she put into that elaborate scheme to strand you on a shrinking ice floe in Lake Michigan, and I think we have some evidence that she really likes you! This is how she flirts. Some kids on playgrounds pull hair and call each other names...Mo beats you with scrap metal and tries to drown you in the frigid waters off of Kenosha... In other words, stop asking about your antenna and ask her out on a date already. If you don't know where to go, try Applebee's...I know a guy (subtweet!) ----------------- Alex’s random old song of the week One of my daughters is obsessed with Super Bowl Halftime Shows. I think it goes back to Katy Perry four years ago, but she has become something of an aficionado...and therefore made me record this year's, which she has since watched several dozen times. If you are counting, she considers it a big step down from Lady Gaga's (which she is right about). But it led to her asking about the guy in purple on the giant screen, which got me to explaining Prince (who, it should be noted, turned in a really good Halftime Show of his own, even if the Bears lost). I am by no means a Prince Superfan, but he's pretty awesome. And there are a whole bunch of songs I could pick (I think the real fans would take Purple Rain or When Doves Cry), but I am going to pick one that wraps up all of his brilliance and overt sexuality in one three minute masterpiece: Little Red Corvette. I mean... I guess I should of closed my eyes When you drove me to the place Where your horses run free 'Cause I felt a little ill When I saw all the pictures Of the jockeys that were there before me That's fucking poetry, man...
America is a nation born of violence. From the very beginning of European settlement, the effort to establish a foothold was a constant battle, sometimes with the peoples here before the Europeans (who weren’t all sunshine and rainbows to each other before Europeans arrived) and sometimes with the land itself. Sometimes it was both: the Lost Colony of Roanoke likely acquired its moniker through a combination of drought and fighting the natives. Settlers were the hardy, the brave, the avaricious, and, often, the desperate.
In the two centuries after Roanoke the border of what became colonies pressed westward. There were Englishmen, and French, and Germans, but the point of the spear was as often as not Irish and Scots-Irish, pushing west from Pennsylvania and Virginia, through the Shenandoah and over the Wilderness Road into Tennessee and Kentucky. Most had little in the way of material possessions, but brought with them one indispensable tool, adopted from German settlers who had settled in Pennsylvania: the “Kentucky” long rifle. The long rifle, with its spiraled bore and longer barrel, offered significant advantages over smooth-bore muskets, in both range and accuracy. Settlers shouldered them in the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s Rebellion, and countless unnamed skirmishes with the Indian tribes. When the break with England came, it was on both sides at Kings Mountain, that battle of rebel and loyalist militias, a rift foreshadowing another still four score years in the future. Those familiar with the movie The Patriot can envision the advantages long rifles could offer from the (albeit technically fictional) scene in which Benjamin Martin threatens Cornwallis with the prospect of officers being targeted in every engagement. That conversation may not have happened but the basic premise is certainly true. The long rifle was present in western Pennsylvania, when the President of a new nation, under a new Constitution, marched out to put down an armed rebellion over a tax on whiskey. President Washington succeeded using just the show of military force, though he left a contingent of 1200 Federal troops behind for a time, just in case. What he did not do, what as far as is known to history he did not even consider doing, was disarm the populace. The new Constitution that President Washington swore to preserve, protect, and defend included a provision almost without precedent in human history. While it did borrow from the English Bill of Rights of a century prior (“Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law”) the Second Amendment to the American Bill of Rights went a step further: it stated that, without reference to religion or social class or any other qualifier, “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The genius of the Second Amendment was not that it recognized the right of individuals to possess arms (the English Parliament had done that, at least for Protestants) or even that it forbade the government from infringing upon that right. The real genius, the thing no government had ever done, was recognizing that the states, and by extension the people, might someday find it necessary to take up arms against an overbearing and tyrannical central government. President Washington was undoubtedly familiar with Federalist No. 46, published in January of 1788 and penned by James Madison, a man largely responsible for the Constitution and Bill of Rights who was serving Virginia in the House of Representatives as Washington marched toward Pennsylvania in late 1794. Washington, for his part, viewed the tax as legitimate under the new federal Constitution but had little desire to use force so early in the life of the nascent republic (he delayed as long as he thought prudent and later pardoned the few men actually convicted of federal crimes.) Madison, much more prone to siding with the People as opposed to the Government, had written in Federalist No. 46 just 6 years prior: Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it. Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. Much has occurred on the topic of the Second Amendment between the Whiskey Rebellion and the present. The militias were put into practice in a war we fought against ourselves. The Supreme Court, as on so much else, has been scattershot: it’s difficult to see (at least to this layman) how the Justices who ruled on United States v. Miller (1939) were reading the same Constitution as those who ruled on Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016). Arms have changed, the federal government has changed, people have changed, but one thing has not changed: the Second Amendment remains the People’s last bulwark against tyranny, whether the majority of citizens, or the federal judiciary, want to admit it or not. This is not an opinion one voices in polite company. The media, and to a large extent the politicians themselves, have done an excellent job painting anyone who believes the main reason the Founders included the Second Amendment is defense from the government as crazy and potentially dangerous. Even among limited government Constitutionalists who believe in the personal right to gun ownership, the idea is considered at the very least eccentric. Most people seem to subscribe to the idea that we have reached the end of history and violence against the government, even if just, would be futile; or they believe we have at least reached a point where we can sort out our differences with the government in court. This is not only extremely naive concerning human nature but also makes the assumption that the government in question must always be federal. Potentially the same applies just as much to resisting, say, your local south Florida sheriff’s office. There is also a segment of the electorate who will never recognize an individual right to firearms at all, or if they do it is limited to single-shot hunting rifles and not “weapons of war.” These are the people who start sentences with “no civilian needs a….” as if the Constitution contains a clause requiring a citizen to prove he “needs” the arms the Second Amendment says he can keep and bear. The implication that the onus is on the citizen to justify their rights, as opposed to the government justifying restrictions on those rights, is typical of the mindset of those who believe that, in every area of life, the government has a duty to do things for you instead of just a responsibility to not do things to you. In a perverse way these people may actually understand the originalist meaning of the Second Amendment better than a lot of gun rights supporters. Their calls for the confiscation of firearms, particularly what they deem “military style” firearms, just so happens to coincide with their desire for ever larger and more intrusive government. This is why they can believe both that individually owned weapons can’t possibly protect you from the overwhelming force of the government and that a pistol in the hands of a sheriff’s deputy has absolutely no chance against an AR-15. The reason this does not strike them as contradictory is that they’re really only interested in one thing: confiscation. Whatever argument they feel advances that goal in the moment is the one they will use, with no concern for accuracy and truth. They realize, consciously or not, that the individual right to keep and bear arms is the last line of defense against their beloved government, and they desire the citizenry be defenseless. Luckily for us, the Founders knew enough about popular passions to implement a system designed to prevent rule by the mob, represented in this case by the mouthpieces from Parkland High and their media co-conspirators. Unfortunately for us, as a society we have become dangerously emotional in our politics (the bad laws passed and the freedoms surrendered in the name of safety, especially children’s safety, are legion) and the guy in the White House seems more than willing to sign a restrictive gun control bill, despite pressure from the Right. In their incessant attacks on the NRA the Left signals that for all their lip service about democracy they don’t much like it when Second Amendment supporters use the tools at their disposal to influence members of Congress. Americans without strong feelings on guns would do well to consider that, if the full court press against the NRA works, the next target may be a lobbying group they do support. The purpose of the Second Amendment is that the people, either individually if necessary or collectively under the flags of their respective states, ultimately possess the means to ensure their liberty, be those means the Long Rifle or the AR-15. There are dangers in the world, but none is so threatening as a free man’s disregard of his natural rights. It is possible that too many have disregarded them for too long, and there is no going back. Surely there remain, as Madison called them, the “free and gallant citizens of America.” Whether there are enough is anyone’s guess. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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