Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 21, 1994 TAG: 9404200019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: The only thing the Why staff remembers about the Revolutionary War is that George Washington crossed the Delaware and stood so precariously on the bow of the boat that he intimidated Cornwallis and Benedict Arnold and was thus able to defeat them at Valley Forge, despite the cold. We also liked the part where Nathan Hale regretted that he had but one life to give for his country, and so offered up, as a bonus, his wife's.
Why is the Revolutionary War so underpublicized? Why are there hardly any Revolutionary War movies? It is, after all, the war that founded this country, the war that was an indisputable victory for us over the British and, let's face it, for good over evil.
Ah-Ha! Therein lies the answer. The Revolutionary War is a victim of its own myth. So monochromatic is our memory of the Revolution that we have not allowed it to take on any interesting hues. The biggest error is that we arrogantly assume we were right and the British wrong, and no other opinions need apply.
"We forgot that there was another side to this," says Fred Anderson, a historian at the University of Colorado.
Did you know, for example, that about half a million Americans in those days were in favor of the other side? They were "loyalists." Loyal to the King. The Revolutionary War was in many ways a civil war: The conflict was not just army against army but family against family, cousin against cousin.
"The only effective movie about the Revolution would be one that made us aware of the loyalists, that made us aware that it was a real civil war, in which families were divided, in which people took principled positions on both sides, and were willing to shed one another's blood for these ideals," says Anderson.
After the British surrendered, many of the loyalists left for Canada. The ones that stayed in the United States had to keep their mouths shut. That was the price of peace: Loyalists couldn't mythologize their own roles in the war. Children grew up unaware that their parents had fought for the Crown. The myth of the Revolution thus grew as a one-sided battle of brave Americans versus tyrannical Britons.
By contrast, the losers of the Civil War vigorously promoted their own myth: The gallantry and heroism of the underdog. America's ongoing Civil War obsession is probably fed by Southerners more than Northerners.
Of course there is another factor that makes the Civil War the greater conflict in American history: More blood. You want drama, you need lots of bodies strewn on cornfields in the grisly attitudes of death. Only a few thousand Americans died during the entire Revolutionary War. There were years when hardly anything happened. Washington's great achievement was keeping the army together despite disease and starvation.
"It was a terrible war," says Anderson. "It was not glorious. It involved lots of suffering and little glory. It's one thing to re-enact Pickett's Charge, it's another thing to just sit around and suffer for a winter and die of typhus."
Besides which we just did that this past winter.
Q: Why are animals so healthy even though they don't seem to eat a balanced diet? Why don't anteaters need to eat vegetables?
A: We just read today that the spotted owl in California eats wood rats, and not much else. How can you survive on one source of food? Isn't that unhealthy and tedious? You can imagine conversations in the spotted owl nest:
"Mom, what's for dinner?"
"Wood rat."
"AGAIN????"
The secret to staying healthy on a monotonous diet is that you have to eat the entire animal. Owls don't sit there picking off the good parts of the rat. They just wolf the thing down, if you don't mind that metaphor applied to an owl. Then at some point they hawk up (hah!) a bolus of bones and hair. Miss Manners probably advises against this move when you are a dinner guest but it's a great way of gleaning all the nutrients from your prey.
Anteaters don't eat much of anything other than ants, but ants are highly nutritious. Kent Redford, a biologist with the Nature Conservancy, says he and his kids routinely fry up the fat-rich winged ants they find in their yard. The neighbor kids eat them too. "I made sure the neighborhood kids went back and asked permission from their mother," he notes.
Our own policy is never to eat anything that has a larval stage.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB