Call to Arms 3

To quote William Daniels as he sings in the movie 1776 as John Adams, "Is anybody there?"

One Day at a Town Meeting

Gentlemen, I stand before you, a simple farmer, and no orator, as Mr. Danett is, but I come before you to refute what he has said.

He has claimed that the blood shed at Lexington was God's punishment for a great sin, the rebellion committed by those whom he called "rebel scum." He goes on to state that all measures imposed against the citizens of Massachusetts are acts of justice.

Well then, gentlemen, I plead before you to answer me: Was it justice that Boston was blockaded, thus depriving the city of much of its sustenance and wealth? Was it justice that our right to hold town meetings was revoked by those who had no authority in the matter? Was it right that soldiers were quartered in our homes against our will?

If there be any among those seated who would confirm these inquiries, I pity your blindness and your ignorance, and yea, gentlemen, I call it blindness to a tyrannical government which has, with astonishing regularity, continued to revoke our rights until we are reduced to mere slaves of the crown.

Mr. Howard, you yourself have stated that you would not tolerate that seven, and yes, I repeat, seven British officers were quartered in your home against your will, and that your wife, already supporting a family of eight, had no choice but to clean their laundry, cook for them, when all you could produce by your trade was enough food for five, and ensure that they would sleep well in your house, and in your own beds! You yourself bristled at this imposition on your liberties, and yet you did nothing!

Mr. Addicock, you were the first of those from Woburn to create support for the formation of the minutemen in your town! You yourself trained them, giving your estate for the time being to another so that it might not fall into disrepair, and paid for muskets, powder, and ammunition out of your own pocket! Such measures reduced you to the level of one destitute, and yet you still stood by our cause. Well, are you standing with us now?

All of you, whether you be farmers, tradesmen, or merchants, listen to me when I say that we can no longer stand idle when our blood has been spilt on our own soil, and as the Almighty God is my witness, that blood cries from the ground a warning, a warning that unless we prepare, unless we train, unless we act now, we will meet the same fate as our slaughtered brethren.

The slaughter at Lexington has marked the beginning of a struggle, and one that cannot be fought on paper and in a parliament. It is too late to use such measures to ensure peace. No, sirs, this is the beginning of a war, and it will be fought by our sons, our fathers, and our grandfathers who will gladly sacrifice their lives for the sake of their liberties. Upright are the men who will stand up for truth and justice. Honorable are they who will take up arms against tyranny. And blessed are those who will fight until such tyranny is no more.

If there be any in this room who are willing to follow me the encampment around Boston, then follow me. If not, remain here, idle and useless, while blood is shed for your sakes.

I have a proposition.

I have a proposition for all BIMA 2008 writers. For every post put on this blog, I will put up five posts.

This is an experiment where I'm trying to see how describing a thought process is written. The title is "Morristown."

I wake up.
I didn't want to.
But I'm a soldier.
So I won't complain.
The rigors of the winter have been successful.
For I have frostbite.
My feet are numb and heavy.
So I rub them 'till they sting.
There are worse things, though.
I won't think of them.
I won't think of seeing my friends die.
I won't think of knowing that they're never coming back.
So I go back to sleep.
Two hours later, I still can't sleep.
I get up.
I see my brother staring at me.
His eyes don't move.
I don't want to live anymore.
God, this wasn't supposed to happen.
He was a good man, a good soldier.
He had a wife and child.
Why?
He was the only family I had left.
Will you leave me with nothing?
It isn't fair.
You took him away.
Now he is never coming back.
Why?
What am I supposed to do now?
His musket has a bayonet.
I could stab myself.
Then I wouldn't be alone.
But that would be selfish.
General Washington needs men anyway.
He can afford to lost someone who has lost his will to live.
No.

The Answer to Why I Love Writing About the American Revolution

This is not really a piece to be posted on this blog, but it is for anyone who thinks I'm obsessed with the American Revolution. I felt that it was the simplest way to tell the BIMA '08 writers the following message, even if anyone is yelling at me to sod off for using blog space for something he or she might think unnecessary.

I was never obsessed with the American Revolution. The word "obsession" comes from the Latin root "obsessio, -onis" a blockade, a blocking up, a siege. The Unabridged Random House Dictionary defines obsession as the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistant idea, image, desire, etc. I can confidentally now say that I am not obsessed with it for the following reasons.

First of all, my thoughts are not being blocked by the A.R. It is not taking over me. It is not a point of frustration for me. It is not a restriction I have imposed upon my writing. It is not a passing fancy (and I've gone through two-six month obsessions before ith different periods in history, such as ancient Rome, the Golden Age of pirates, and the dinosaurs). Above all, it is not an interest.

For me, the AR is a way of life. It is part of who I am. I share its memories. Although I was not alive during that period, it is still part of me. I am not denying anything when I say this. The AR was a part of my soul that had to be discovered, and now that I have discovered it, I am responsbile for nurturing that part of my soul.

Then why do I write about it and not just learn about it? Let me sidetrack for a moment to a memory from the AR. In a book by David Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University, Paul Revere's Ride, he describes the following scene: It is April nineteenth, 1775, two or three in the morning. Militiamen all across Massachusetts are receiving the alarm that "The Regulars are out!" and they are doing what they've signed up for: getting ready within a minutes notice. As one man is about the leave his family to join his company, he and his wife make eye contact. Then he says, "Take good care of the children." She never sees him again. True story.

Why should that affect me? Because I know how it feels to lose someone I love; a boy I once loved died and I remember lying in bed, night after night, crying, "Santi, my love!" (his name was Santiago). When I saw that I was connected to that woman who was alive over two hundred years ago, I recognized that if I didn't tell the stories of those men and women who lived during the AR, then I am personally responsible for forgetting how much blood was shed so that, as Ester Forbes wrote, "a man can stand up." It is amazing what our founders, and I'm referring to the soldiers as well as the generals, were willing to do so that men could stand up.

I posted a poem a while back, "I Weep for Our Continental Soldiers." While it was not my best poem, it was part of the early realization that, as pompous and egotistic and bloody unbelieveable as it sounds, I am part of the remembrance of the AR. Please understand that when I said, "I weep," I was not joking in that I have shed tears for it, and not just while watching movies from that period.

A Time Traveling Guide to the Perplexed Fanatic

Note- This guide is only meant to be a guide for perplexed history fanatics, so if you were browsing through the "Guidebooks of Fanatics" section of your local Borders or Barnes and Noble, go away try reading the work of the sodding bastard whose work is all of the five books to my left. Because any man who happens to be more successful than me simply because he writes about the history of pornography has either permanently lost his sense of humor and deserves to to be guillotined, or has lost his sense of humor, spent several days looking for it desperately, and then remembered that he had to no sense of humor from the start. As for the gentleman picking one of my rivals books off the shelf, you can fuck off.

"A Time Traveling Guide to the Perplexed Fanatic: Written for Anyone Who Doesn't Read 'The Guidebook for Idiots'"

By a Perplexed Fanatic

Table of Contents
1. An introduction for anyone who reads These damn things, and they're always so bloody boring anyway. Not mine, though. My introduction will have you laughing so hard your stomach will tie itself into a slip knot.- page one
2. Chapter One: Where I admit that I am more cynical than sarcastic, that I have no sense of humor whatsoever, and that I can see so far into the future that I know at exactly what time your wife will trip over her too-long wedding dress.
3. Chapter Three: Whoops! Looks like the printer forgot how to count.
4. Chapter Four: Why it is necessary for BIMA 2008 writers to post if they don't wish for me to grab the eighteenth-century musket I keep in my closet and unleash holy heck.
5. Chapter Five: Where I gladly conclude this book and announce my retirement from the life of a writer, and I announce that I will begin a lifetime of work at the Hospital of Uninspired Writers, where I expect to meet Shakespeare, Dickenson, and Alcott very soon.

I Weep for Our Blessed Continental Soldiers- This is a very personal piece.

I lay awake in bed, tormented by the scream of the dead and dying
Soldiers who fought two hundred years ago.
Silly girl, such tears have no place so late and far from their inspiration!
So sang the embittered psalmist, as I recall.

I can still hear the bullets at Lexington. Isn't that odd?
That I can still here the random shot,
That I can see the smoke and blood and feel my legs
Running from the regulars,
Seeing them spill down the blood-soaked soil of Breed's Hill,
Someone's hand crunches beneath my feet,
"Don't fire until you can see the whites of their eyes!"
Have you ever fired a musket before?
I half-know the motions from reading about it and seeing it done.

One shot is loud.
A broadside is louder, and the volume can be tuned out,
But not the blood, the crushed skulls underfoot,
The constant waves of men that tumble and knock down their
Comrades who are marching up the hill.

Then New York and Fort Washington.
May God bless the souls of those
Unfortunates who were bayoneted to trees by the Hessians.
May God bless all of our brave soldiers who died that day.

I suffer with them when they call smallpox and dysentery
And the flu and colds and measles and venereal disease,
And it is terrible at Valley Forge, where I am stuck inside a hut
In a winter that sucks the warm breath out of my lungs
Like an icy vacuum.