Two men named Thomas, born a century and a half apart, had the vision to see what this country might some day become.
Thomas Morton overthrew the leaders of a group of settlers sent by Ferdinando Gorges to found the short-lived Merrymount, in what is now Quincy. Morton called himself “Mine Host,” and declared himself the equal of all the former indentured servants in the group. As long as they were able, they cohabited peacefully with the area’s indigenous people. Settlers and natives all celebrated May Day of 1627 together by dancing around a May Pole topped with a set of antlers.
Such fun could not be tolerated for long, of course. Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth colony sent Myles Standish—Mr. Buzzkill himself—to arrest Morton, who was then marooned on the Isles of Shoals before being exiled to England for further legal harassment. He wrote a book about Merrymount, titled New English Canaan. Naturally, it was the first to be banned on this side of the Atlantic. The next few years were difficult for Morton, but he never knuckled under. Try as they might, and they have tried mightily, the Fun Police have never fully succeeded in expunging his spirit from the American character.
Thomas Paine was a natural-born stirrer-up of trouble. As an English excise officer, he blotted his copy-book by publishing a pamphlet aimed at Parliament, arguing for better pay and working conditions. In one of history’s greatest flukes, as he was dodging debtor’s prison in London he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, the one Founding Father with a discernable sense of humor. Franklin’s letter of recommendation may even have saved Paine’s life. He was carried off the ship by Franklin’s doctor after a typhoid-ridden crossing.
Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, published 250 years ago last January 10th, was the first, and may still be the best, articulation of the virtues of democratic self-government. His description of the absurdity of the British monarchy, i.e., William the Conqueror’s arrival in 1066—“A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original”—has certainly stood the test of time. [See W.D. Ehrhart, on page six.] He wasn’t just with Washington at Valley Forge, he wrote the pamphlets Washington read to the troops to keep them from deserting. But in this world no good deed[s] go unpunished. Paine went to France during that revolution, nearly losing his head to the guillotine. His plea for help to Washington went unanswered. He managed to escape, but, shunned for his lack of conventional piety, he died broke and friendless.
Both these Thomases believed, as Paine put it, “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” This famously being the nation’s 250th year, it’s as good a time as any to ask the plural form of the Ed Koch question: “How’re we doing?”
Rather than directly answering that question ourselves, and fairly well exhausted by the effort required to sustain rational thought this long under current conditions, perhaps we’ll just record a few random chunks of our splintered reality, to see if a pattern emerges.
On Wednesday morning, the orange-hued protoplasmic entity currently occupying the federal housing unit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue tweeted a photograph of itself standing next to a nepo baby who goes by the name of Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, blah blah blah, aka King Chuck. Above the photo, in all caps, were the words, “TWO KINGS,” followed by an emoji of a crown. To be fair, and to his credit, at least his delusions of grandeur have descended from the sacred to the secular.
As monarchs go, there have been worse. Chuck’s distant cousin Leopold II, for example, is responsible for the deaths of about 10 million Congolese, prompting his own Belgian subjects to boo his funeral cortege. Chuck’s host this weekend can’t touch that. Only about 760,000 deaths have resulted, so far, from his shutdown of USAID last year.
The Head Dude of the ’Murican gummint is supposed to be unimpressed by foreign titles. Such is not the case with our Orange Mussolini. He’s such a fanboy he blurted out this inanity: “Charles agrees with me even more than I do.”
Of course, the object of our disaffection constantly strives to say things that, one way or another, are simply unbelievable. Here’s another example from this weekend: “I am not a pedophile.”
If the U.S. were a fish, and its head this rotten, what sane person would buy it? Yet, here we are, and we’re not going anywhere. Rationality isn’t everything.
This Guy, aided by his gang of shifty grifters, is wrecking and looting this country at a pace “like you’ve never seen before,” to steal one of his favorite phrases.
God, so to speak, knows this newspaper can’t stop him. But we’re on board to beginning the nation over again. This time with less Donald and more Thomases.