Yankee Doodle: We still own it

Yankee Doodle went to town, Riding on a pony, Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. It was a pejorative song about unsophisticated, provincial Americans sung by pre-revolutionary British. You know how we reacted to it? We adopted it as our own. We owned it. We sang it back to them. How American is that?

So here we are. On the eve of our 244th Birthday, we are enduring one of the more difficult years in my lifetime, right up there with 1968 and 2001. We have a virus to contend with, but we will handle it the same way that we handled Smallpox, Spanish Flu and Polio. We’re the country that gave the world Jonas Salk, Alexander Flemming and Robert Jarvik. We can handle this.

You may also have heard about the latest flap. There was a press leak suggesting that the Russian Government was paying a cash bounty for American soldiers in Afghanistan at the same time that we were in negotiations with Mr. Putin. That sounds entirely plausible, but the Pentagon has not confirmed it as fact. For now, it’s speculation. Remember, of course, that we have dealt with paid mercenaries before. You may recall hearing about George Washington taking out a boating party on Christmas Day of 1776. In a raid on Trenton, Washington’s army took an estimated 1,000 Hessian mercenaries prisoner. We have been down that road before.

We also have other issues. Immigration is still in need of top-down reform, and it looks like law enforcement will undergo reforms as well (though that will be better handled at the local level). Now in its third week, Seattle police are just now getting around to evicting the pasty white kids who took over a section of their city, but again, we have dealt with that. Whether the Whisky rebellion or the Civil War, we can handle that too.

There’s a great old Bill Murray movie titled “Stripes.” It’s a military version of a screwball comedy, but in it, Murray describes Americans affectionately as “mutts,” “wretched refuse,” and “mutants.” That attitude has been with us from the start. We first had the audacity to assert that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That was just plain crazy talk in 1776. Merry old England was, if nothing else, all about top-down management. Suggesting that their right to govern came from us was just downright cheeky.

As disturbing as it is to dogs and working people (and it truly is) we celebrate our nation’s birthday, in part, by sending things into the air, to blow up, to make noise and a noteworthy spectacle. We could just as easily light $50 bills on fire, but we are making a statement that says, “We are rebels. Don’t mess with us.”

That’s the American spirit, but there is also American exceptionalism. Whether landing on the moon, or the beaches at Normandy, or Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill, we have a long tradition of people overcoming obstacles and serving our country with distinction. We are the home of Harriet Tubman, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, George Washington Carver, John Rockefeller, Bill Gates and our own Warren Buffet.

Less well known is a favorite American hero of mine, Captain Jeremiah Denton. He’s the

Vietnam-era POW who, while being video taped for Vietnamese propaganda purposes, spelled out the word “torture” with his eye lids in morse code. That was gutsy, and I’m sure he took a beating for it, but it’s that kind of boldness and ingenuity that we can be proud of.

For all our faults (and we certainly have them) we have accomplished much of what we set out to do 244 years ago. The quartering of troops hasn’t been a problem (although it wouldn’t hurt us to bring a disabled vet home with us) and the military does indeed answer to civilian authority.

We have the right to “levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do” and we even have taxation with representation (such as it is).

We are not as divided as some want us to think we are. Times are admittedly tough. We are too often separated by ideology and sadly, a very vocal few would like to see us separated by race, but we will overcome. As we celebrate our unique American experience, let’s remember the words of Benjamin Franklin who said, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”