Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I
(No Kings, Ever!)

The Battles of Lexington and Concord, as well as the Stand of Samuel Whittlemore, took place on this day, 250 years ago.

I've written a number of posts about this day over the years of this blog. You can read them by clicking on the tag at the bottom of this one. And I thought that I'd write a humdinger for this one. I'm a child of Middlesex County. As a scout, I marched twice in the Lexington parade.

But no.

It strikes me as somewhat ironic that the very same people who blathered on that having universal health insurance was tyranny are now falling into place behind a demented old man who wants to be a dictator. The very same people, mind you, who say that they "back the blue", but were eager to kill cops over a bunch of cows in Idaho and who actually did kill cops on 1/6/21.

Do I think that the men who assembled on the Town Green at Lexington, who were at the North Bridge in Concord and who harassed the Lobsterbacks all the way back to the Charles River would be horrified that the very people who claim to be their spiritual descendants are supporting a wannabee tyrant? You bet your ass I do. They are betraying the sacrifices of everyone who fought at Lexington, Concord, Groton Heights, Yorktown and every battle and skirmish between the first two listed and the last two.

So, no. There's not much to celebrate when so many Americans are willing to throw away their libery and freedom that was purchased at the cost of so much blood, treasure and lives, only if they see somebody suffer more than they may.

The war* got going 249 years ago this day. It is also the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was one of many.

I probably should snark that the current government in the Massachusetts Commonwealth is very much against citizens owning state-of-the-art weaponry and, in that regard, they have more in common with the Lobsterbacks than they do with the Colonialists. I'm surprised that they haven't made Concord replace the musket held by the Minuteman with a rake or some such.
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* "The war", when I was a child, referred to either the Revolutionary War or the Second World War. That 19th Century dust-up in the South was not given much regard, because, after all, we had won that one, too.

Reports are flooding in that anti-government extremists using assault weapons to interfere with the lawful seizure of an arsenal has turned into a running gunbattle and has resulted in at least 300 Government casualties.

Crime scenes are scattered along a 14 mile stretch from Concord to Cambridge.

Crown officials vow a full investigation into the incident and arrest of all involved. Arrest warrants have been issued for Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and many more are sure to follow.

God save the King.

(Circa 1775)

Shit's going on here. This post will take you to others I've written.

Worth reading: The Minute Men by John Galvin

Today is Patriots' Day, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the Colony of Massachusetts kicked off the Revolutionary War. I've written about it a few times in the past.

No doubt, there will be some mealy-mouthed bullshit from politicians who are in it for power and profit. Fuck them.

And fuck the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. If the servile cowards governing the state were there in 1775, the Minutemen would have been lucky to have been armed with bows and arrows.

That was a command that was given by an army officer 243 years ago.

It wasn't obeyed.

The war was on. It would last for eight years, ending in a series of treaties in Paris.

All most all of the major European powers used the Revolutionary War as a pretext to go to war against somebody else. In some ways, the war might be viewed as a continuation, or appendix, to the Seven Years War. If historians were agreeable to a bit of renaming, the Seven Years War might be renamed the First World War.

For reasons that, to be blunt, are none of yer frelling business, I've not been able to pay much attention to either this blog or the news for the last few days.1

Today is Patriots' Day, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the Colony of Massachusetts kicked off the Revolutionary War. I've written about it a few times in the past.

Also, for your reading pleasure, a past essay on patriotism.
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1 Which is why you've been seeing mostly photos, links and short snark.

That is the command that a British officer shouted to the Colonial militiamen at the Lexington town green at dawn on April 19th, 1775.

It was not obeyed. The war was on.

By the way, most colonials would have regarded themselves at the time as British citizens. Riding about, shouting "the British are coming" would have made no sense. The alarm was passed quietly.

My early childhood was lived in some of the towns where fighting took place. When people spoke of "the war", they were referring to either the Revolutionary War or World War II. That little brouhaha to the south in the middle of the 19th Century wasn't paid much attention.

Because today is about what happened 239 years ago, not about last year and not about the Brothers Kablamazov.

But even as I write this post, a week before Patriots' Day, the wailing and gnashing of bombing remembrances is going on damn near nonstop on cable news (when they can break away from covering missing Malaysia Air flight 370).

Fuck that noise. We should be writing about the brave militamen who resisted the Lobsterbacks and remembering their dedication and sacrifice for the cause of freedom. We should not be writing about two young assholes from Chechnya. Fuck those guys.

On April 19, 1775, the British Army in Boston prepared to march troops into Middlesex County,Massachusetts to seize the muskets and gunpowder of the local militias. Because of the danger posed by large amounts of gunpowder, militiamen only had filled powderhorns at home. The rest was kept in local magazines.

Rebel spies noted the movement of the Lobsterbacks and hung lights in the steeple of the Old North Church to signal riders in Cambridge.


The riders fanned out across the countryside, alerting the militiamen.


In the predawn hours of April 19th, about eighty militamen, known to history as the Minutemen, assembled on the green in Lexington to meet the marching soldiers.


The orders given to the Minutemen were concise and clear.


Somebody did fire a shot; the Minutemen skirmished with the advanced guard of the British expedition. The soldiers marched onto Concord, searching homes and farms for weapons. The Minutemn fired across the North Bridge, wounding most of the British officers with their first volleys. The British were turned back.


When the British Army left Concord, the fighting turned brutal and nasty. Rumors flew through the British ranks that one of their dead in Concord had been scalped. In searching some of the houses, British soldiers found liquor and drank it, with some of the Redcoats becoming intoxicated. Many of the searches of homes were done with a heavy hand, outraging the inhabitants, most of whom still considered themselves to be Englishmen.

While it's likely that the legend of long-range rifle fire was a myth, Minutemen fought in both organized formations and as skirmishing dragoons-- riding up on horseback to cover, firing from cover and then fleeing. Minutemen shot at the Redcoats from longer ranges, even though smoothbore muskets of the era were capable of shooting a 72" group at 100 yards (M-1 rifles had a design accuracy of 4" groups).

Homeowners began to resist the British, including men as old as eighty years old. British officers struggled to control their soldiers, who were often liquored up, from killing civilians. The British commanders in Boston sent reinforcements to rescue the expedition and they made it back to Boston.

Boston in the 18th Century was a peninsula in name only. Tactically, Boston was an island connected to the mainland by a thin bridge of land.


Over ten thousand militiamen from eastern and southern New England soon arrived to lay siege to the town of Boston.

The Revolutionary War was underway, though it would be more than a year before that fact was fully acknowledged by the rest of the American colonies.

Update: I wrote this post a few days in advance. By coincidence, a friend and I spent an hour today (Patriots' Day) at a pistol range.

April 19th is more than the first day of Passover and the 65th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghettto Uprising. It is also Patriots' Day, the 233rd anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. 50 Americans died, as did 73 Lobsterbacks. These were the first battles of the Revolutionary War. [1]

"Stand your ground. Do not fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." Maybe those words were said, maybe not. But when I was a child in the part of the Commonwealth where the fighting took place, you learned those words at an early age.

And you learned that freedom and liberty are things to fight and kill and die for, not things to be thrown away in haste out of fear. The sons and daughters of liberty in Massachusetts, who took up arms against the superpower of that day, were not fearful folk.

Pity how far we have fallen, when one of the two political parties outright pursues a policy of giving up liberty and surrendering freedom for tyranny, in the vain hope of purchasing a small degree of safety, while the other political party was unwilling to confront them on it until it became politically expedient to do so.

[1]Bush, the man for whom there is no such thing as an original thought, tried to hijack the name to designate September 11th. I say: Fuck him.