A Little Patrick Henry in the Evening

This year, we're starting in on our Saturday night public house program, featuring music, hearty food, 18th century sing-a-longs, and the oratory of Patrick Henry. One of the school tour dads, this week, after hearing my version of the son of thunder's speech, said, "we should do a documentary on this place. It's so close to the surface for you. You really live this conflict, as though the wound were still open."

I thought for a moment, and then I said: "I believe in the depravity of man; As they say about the holocaust, 'Never Forget.'"

I used the holocaust for a reason in my response because, the trend in human behavior is to make previous conflicts feel comic, improbable, forgotten--even if the scope of the evil is almost impossible to process in its enormity. That's why the pillaging Redcoats of yesteryear, who struck fear in the hearts of the colonists, have become today's red-woolen dandies. That's why Mel Brooks can get a laugh out of even "Spring Time For Hitler and Germany." As a defense mechanism, or perhaps because we are addicted to what Patrick Henry caled "that phantom of hope," we need to make the truly evil truly improbable. We can't stand the notion that we might have some complicity in it, or some call to oppose it. In another sense, it's why living history can sometimes appear neutral and bloodless--played out by academics and hobbyists who want to see so many different sides of an issue they can't ever settle on single truth of the matter. It was either right, or wrong, to tax the colonists without their consent. It was either right, or wrong, to march on their provincial arsenals and steal their ammunition from them. It was either right, or wrong, to shoot them dead for mustering on a village green.

If we settle on the truth, we have to do something about it, so the tendency is to pretend there is no question at all. It's easy to pretend there isn't a problem with encumbering our grandchildren right into economic long term slavery. It's easy to pretend we can kill off more than a million of our children in the womb every year without understanding that we are living in the middle of a holocaust. It's easy to pretend that our political parties really represent our ideals--when it is becoming more and more clear they are padding their pensions and paying off their donors. On a whole deafening roar of issues, it is easy to pretend there is really no question at all.

But as Patrick Henry said, "the question before the house is one of awful moment for this country."

Indeed.

Let us raise our glass to a man who didn't avoid the question.