country 2
no, it turns out there's a whole nuther way I appreciate this country, our country, the United States of America. through its history. there, once again, we find that I have an amalgam, a pressed-together of images and texts (not real, these are in my head). my history of the U.S. starts, of course with the frivolous, sugarcoated history that annoys me now, why do they pass that drivel off to kids? what about it satisfies some man, no doubt, and what part of him does it satisfy? ah, a good question! and the answer to it ruins whatever history we accumulate here. see, this history has to teach patriotism, whatever the heck that is. eww! no! shouldn't history just be an accumulation of facts? what we did, when we did it, where we did it, and what we meant to accomplish by doing it. um. right away you see the problem. much of what we did is unedifying. we deceived, we outright lied, we murdered, we maimed, we raped, we stole, worse than that, we stole pettily - we didn't just steal land, we stole the dolls the kids played with. we didn't just maim, we mutilated and infected. and we did it knowingly, there was no accident about it. we can't tell the kids the simple story, we have to pretty it up. no matter how old the "kids" are in our expected audience. eww! let's pause and hold our noses together a moment or so before this stinking pile, before we pour on the toilet water, the fragrance, the perfume. there. that should do it. okay then, a group of men met as the Continental Congress, did a few things, and went home, then came back - more or less the same group of men - and figuratively scampered about (they stood and sat and talked in a room in Philadelphia) trying to catch up with facts as militia and others acted on their own. eventually they convinced their fellow citizens, at least some of them, that they were in charge and - poof! - invented an army and - poof! - declared a general and pretty much left it up to him to take control of people who were already fighting. he did. and he was one of those lucky choices that some people later wanted to claim was divinely inspired, except the Second Continental Congress had no trappings of divinity or even authority. they did what they could get away with, and it worked. mostly. they became the de facto government of the united colonies while the colonies were still tussling over what kind of government they wanted. their first attempt to document how they'd work became the Articles of Confederation, which were ratified by the colonies, one by one, lastly by Maryland on 2 February 1781. The Articles of Confederation were our constitution for at least six and a half years. from 14 May til 17 September of 1787 the Constitutional Convention met. it was originally called to revise the Articles, but quickly became a redesign. eventually the document was sent out to be ratified, and even more eventually it was on 21 June 1788. oh yeah, didn't we start a war that we were now "governing"? yes, yes, the war didn't just politely go away. it wore on and on. the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, and the fighting formally ended with the Treaty of Paris on 3 September 1783. so, at least in my version, the war started, the Second Continental Congress met and hurried to take charge in some sense, George Washington made an army out of a raggedy militia or several raggedy militia, the Articles of Confederation were assembled, argued over, and ratified. we won the war on the battlefield, we won the war in the peace treaty, and we put together the Constitution which makes us the nation we are.... well, it governed the nation as late as yesterday. as far as I know, it's still the law of the land. I admire it. I appreciate what we had until Donald Trump was elected president. may it continue.
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