Random Observations From The Road
Having just returned from a jaunt into and around a sliver of America I have just a couple of unrelated observations to make:
1) Nobody knows or cares about what Barack Obama or John McCain are up to right now. Presidential politics simple are not registering. Obama might have called McCain a “cracker-ass mo-fo” last week for all I know. There is some knowledge that Obama is the Democratic nominee which I think arises from the fact that people think that it is interesting that racism in America has been solved.
2) The era of fast food must be coming to an end. The McDonalds and Burger Kings I had the misfortune to dine in were uniformly dirty and poorly run. I have no idea why anyone would eat at these places that have such outward and strident contempt for their customer.
3) The French REALLY saved our asses at the battle of Yorktown. No. I mean it they REALLY saved our asses. I had no idea how big a debt that we owed to France. I knew the rudiments about how the French naval blockade kept Cornwallis from being reinforced, but I had no idea about the huge naval battle that took place or that Washington had to be talked into going to Yorktown by Lafayette or that French infantry troops comprised such a large number of the total number of troops that attacked Yorktown.
4) American teenagers don’t work summer jobs anymore. Russian and Ukrainian teenagers are working them all. I have no idea what American teenagers are up to but it probably does not have anything to do with Presidential politics.
which would be why Jefferson was so against remaining nuetral when france and britain fought…
Lost nine of our brave troops in Afgan today. Somehow i wounder why we are in Iraq. let us not forget these are the folks who allowed the Saudis to attack us on 911 and also they are the ones who defeated the Russians
The French helped us in a big way during the Revolution and provided the Patriots with 100,000 muskets and a lot more. The taxes needed to support this largesse helped trugger the French Revolution.
Never forget that the French were usin the rebels as surrogates against their #1 enemy. We nearly went to war with France a few years later over the XYZ affair but ended up fightin England. Yet our twice enemy became our primary trading partner and the Royal Navy enforced the Monroe Doctrine.
Statecraft in a dynamic and non-linear game.
Jason “Jack Keruac” DelLib
Another misconception, washington and his continental army won the war.
Wrong, the reason the british gave up was they could not defeat the gurrilla forces under people like Francis Marion, and John Sumter. The major victorys in the north, such as fort Ticonderoga and Saratoga were won by the Green mountain boys another gurrilla group.
Washington only won three out of ten battles, and as you found out without the french it`s doubtful he would have won Yorktown.
As a Viet Nam vet., the anology of how difficult it is to defeat a gurrilla army is not lost on me. Iraq is another example.
Orginized armys are seldom as effective in wars of conquest as gurrilla armys are.
Correction – SOME American teenagers do not work summer jobs
I think for many people my age adolescence has been pushed through till the end of college.
It ends at college? Says who?
Ray K
Too bad GWB never studied history.
Jason330;
He admitted to Maureen Dowd, the NYT columnist that he was never much into reading, and this was before the morons elected him the second time.
The ‘importation’ of summer guest workers up and down the East coast should be investigated by a government agency.
These kids are charged to get here, lied to about housing, etc. and expected to hand over part of their earnings in order to return home. Take some time to talk to one or two of them….you will be shocked. There is an ‘agency’ who makes these arrangements.
This, to me, is a similar thing w/our cousins from south of the border. We are told Americans will not accept certain jobs. Our teens are given a bad rap on work ethics.
It’s the old tune: ‘we’ don’t want the ‘hard’ work. True..under the conditions that the above workers are forced to endure.
comte de Rochambeau!
I’ve spoken to a few of the Eastern European kids working in Rehoboth and they all seem to like it. A couple were a little bit homesick, but they didn’t strike me as terribly unhappy.
I would venture to say that almost all of the kids who go to the beach for the summer (foreign or not) are paying a nice chunk of change to live in squalor with 18 other kids. What’s to complain about? Three months of hard work interspersed with sunbathing, concerts and partying sounds like paradise to me.
As a result of the miserable efforts of 1777, each of the three top British generals were fired.
General Howe had bucked authorities in England who wanted his twenty thousand to march north up the Hudson Valley as a southern-most front in the New England strategy. Instead, he took off from Manhattan for the Chesapeake, landed near Head of Elk and passed through Newark on his way to take the colonists’ capital city of Philadelphia.
The defeat of the British in the north led to the French committment of troops which arrived by way of New Port, RI in 1781.
The naval superiority of the French here was indeed what won Yorktown.