Dear Diary: I was dancing in the woods, with Miss Bonnie Andrews and the other girls. I wished for that witch Goody Sarah to burn in hell…
Jacked up on her media-fueled bus tour promoting “Our Proud American Heritage and History” (the purported mission being to help Americans “appreciate the significance of our nation’s historic sites, patriotic events and diverse cultures”), Goody Sarah has made several humiliating, failed turns. The first, as biker babe (“I love the smell of the emissions!”), another as New York pizza eater (with a fork), and today, the most egregious regional gaffe yet – the desecration of the story that every single American child knows by heart: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.
Doing what any other untraveled plebeian does when visiting Boston (for the first time, as a 47 year old, as a United States politician): she checked out Paul Revere’s house. To Ms. Palin, the famed Midnight Ride seemed to have involved a cacophony of noise, bells, gunfire, and a warning that the British were out to take away Americans’ as-yet-nonexistent Second Amendment rights (Paul Revere’s historic ride occurred in 1775, the constitutional convention did not even convene until 1787).
What sayeth the former half-term Alaska governor frometh whom all intellect has been drained?
“He who warned, uh, the … British that they weren’t going to be takin’ away our arms, uhm, by ringin’ those bells and making sure as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”
Pray, pardon me, Goody Sarah, we all knoweth that Revere wasn’t “sendin’ any messages” to the redcoats – who were about to move on the patriots’ weapons stockpiles and arrest key leaders – he was warning the Minutemen that the Brits were coming so these militia members could prepare. He wasn’t “ringin’ bells” or “firin’ shots” into the air – the mission was a secret. He had to quietly deliver the message that the regulars were coming to arrest John Adams and John Hancock. Quietly. So quietly that he had arranged – lest he be prevented from leaving Boston – for a buddy to hang either one or two lanterns in the bell tower of the Old North Church indicating that troops would row “by sea” (“two if by sea”, blahblahblah, across the Charles River to Cambridge, rather than marching “by land” (“one if by land”,yadayadayada), out Boston Neck. His ride wasn’t some vague, nonsensical act of symbolism, racing into town guns blazing and horns honking to make some sort of statement, it was a thing. An operation. An inarguably low-tech stealth operation, in support of a local resistance movement whose goals at that point remained largely undefined.
I mean God, Sarah, no wonder the British lost! Apparently, they went into the whole Revolutionary War thinking that we would not be armed! Hence, they neglected to bring sufficient weaponry of their own! Fortunately, Revere’s warning apparently arrived too late! It’s a long trip back to London to grab one’s musket and then race back to the colonies to get into the battle! And I can’t stop thinking about that poor HORSE! Poor ol’ Brown Beauty, first galloping all the ways to Boston to warn the British they weren’t taking away our guns, then she’s trotting off to Lexington and Concord, while her rider is psychotically ringing bells and shooting guns to warn John Hancock and Sam Adams that the British were coming….. to (take away their guns? I dunno). She’s the real loser here.
Footnote: see evidence of linguistic “confusion” and, “abuses and corruption”s of the mother tongue. Goody Sarah’s unsophisticated version of what linguists call “colonial lag” presumes that this transplanted tongue has had her rageth and deprived of the use of her reason! She has been and is a person esteemed pious that she knew nothing of the things that she spoke of but her tongue was improved to expressed what was never in her mind! A matter of great affliction to her.