Ft. Nonsense, NJ

WHEN THE KING OF ENGLAND invaded America, he sent an army the size of the largest city on the Continent.

It was 1776—a gorgeous June—when the first war ships arrived in New York Harbor and they kept coming in over the course of a month, as a nervous rebel army, camped out in the woods of Brooklyn and stinkpits of Manhattan, watched.

Earlier that year, the King’s soldiers had been expelled from Boston by these same rummy-eyed hayseeds, using stolen canons and the charm of Massachusetts to scare all the redcoats into their beloved boats.

They fled then, with their tillers between their legs, sailing all the way up to lonely Canada, where they were forced to sit pretending to clean their muskets and wait for reinforcements on that shameful, distant moon.

This was a lot for a Mother Country to take, particularly for its Dad, King George 3.

George 3 was a particularly little shit—the product of about 100+ years of a massive upswing for England, which had transformed into something called ‘Great Britain’.

It was a big enterprise, OK? Run by a bunch of ambitious EVPs, who were obsessed with money and power, and all they had to do was prop up George 3, their semi-lame duck CEO.

Those guys started flying a brand-new flag that looked like the future back then (and kind of still does), and they sailed that flag around the world, making everyone who saw it, kiss it.

From Ireland to China.

They figured out how to mint money from misery.

Which made everyone wearing a sash pretty rich, but left everybody else in need of a drink, or equal rights, or something to hold onto besides their neighbor’s throat. The rich were all building Downton Abbeys and treating everyone like their servants, and embroidering silken targets on each other’s backs.

History never seems to understand the part of the story it’s in.

When the British invaded America, they didn’t know they were entering a trap game—that they were due for a loss, and that their whole system of running the world, on fear and ignorance, wasn’t sustainable in light of their stupid wooden boats and their fucked-up approach to customer service.

The Beatles would come along to captivate the world 200 years too late to save the empire. I Wanna Hold Your Hand would probably have precluded the Continental Congress, but Heart of Oak wasn't going to do unionjackshit.

 . . .

In a series of battles, the Rebels were steadily pushed north, from Brooklyn, all the way up through Manhattan island, nose-bleeding into Yonkers, then Westchester, and then finally south…spilling over the Hudson River into pitiful New Jersey.

As the year 1776 was drawing to a close, things weren’t looking good.

If the Continental Army were a football team, their record going into December would be 3-10, and they would already be mathematically eliminated from playoff contention.

A stiff breeze with an English accent would have knocked the whole bunch over.

They spent their days glancing over their shoulders while marching through what was then—more so than any other colony— a den of Loyalists (or Tories), and bad pizzerias, and overpriced wedding venues.

The fighting force, which had first seen action in Brooklyn at a strength of 23,000, had by then shrunk to like 400 people with only 80 pairs of shoes between them, which they all had to share.

This was the time of year when armies usually cut off campaigning, and after coming so close to finishing off the insurrection, the British had decided to stop for now, and pick things back up in Spring, if the war was still even going on by then.

Their soldiers had taken over the best places in the Tri-Colony area to hole up.

The Colonials were left with limited prospects: some abandoned Quiznos franchises in no-horse backwoods towns, mostly on the wrong side of the Delaware.

It was fitting for the less than gallant dregs of a rebellion running on fumes.

But before the Continentals turned in for a winter that none of them thought they would ever escape, their commander, George Washington, made them assemble in some parking lot, standing in lines and rows, weak as tea in a harbor, dredged, feeling stupid, missing home and shot through with doubt.

Washington told them to huddle up.

He was like:

“Alright everybody, take a knee.”

So they did.

This guy Washington had appeared on the scene about a year ago, looking like an 18th century Elvis, showing up in some Philadelphia drawing room where a bunch of bald guys wearing wigs were arguing over decorum. Washington just picked up a standing base and started to play it like an electric guitar.

And the whole place went nuts.

When people looked at him, they wanted to fire a gun.

Being on the receiving end of one of his nods was like the feeling you get when the picky dog at work sits on your lap.

But so far Washington hadn’t lived up to the hype.

By then, his shine had worn off, and now he was just the guy in charge: some ex-British colonel, with a hat, two horses, 30 letter-writing acquaintances in Philadelphia, surrounded by a skeleton army of exhausted, glorified, people.

What they didn’t know, was that Washington had come up with a plan to save the Revolution, and he needed all of their help to pull it off.

“Hey.” He said. “We’re a country.”

The soldiers just looked at each other, jug-eared; a cacophony of regional accents all speechless, everyone wearing torn up, mud pressed Carhart’s and Old Navy fleeces bought on Clearance (uniforms were still a year off), surrounded by empty kegs of flat beer.

They were all like: “Are you sure?”

And George Washington told them ‘Yes.’

And when they heard that, the Americans knew it was true.

. . .

From my perspective the Revolutionary War wasn’t this clash of faultless, mythic titans that played out on some ideological plane tilted to the Right. It was just a bunch of inspired neighbors, who were sick of getting pushed around.

Feeling like we do today.

In reality, the people who fought in the Revolution would be as recognizable to you as your cat’s asshole.

There are those who will try to get you to believe otherwise, but at their heart, The Founders have always been, and always will be, one of us.

James Baldwin said it best: ‘Anyone who was making it in England, did not get on the Mayflower.’

These were really the dregs of every European society, who had escaped a world run by thousands of years of trust funds. But there’s nothing wrong with dregs. My people were dregs, and yours likely were too.

And though, over time, there were a lot of rich jerks who ended up over here, The Revolutionary War was this great big DIY nightmare for some regular-ass people, who had to beg the French for guns, the Dutch for money, and cast their own bullets out of melted-down PBR empties.