Palin conjures up those box-of-rocks comparisons again



Palin, Paul and mangled history

 I wouldn’t have mind it if Sarah (the joke who would be President) Palin had simply mangled the historical accuracy surrounding Paul Revere. Afterall, most Americans’ images of Revere are based not on history books but on a work of fiction — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere that was written in 1861, 86 years after Revere, at the behest of physician Joseph Warren, attempted to ride from Boston to Concord to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the regular army, as it was called then, was after them. Revere was one of several riders who made the trip and many of them traveled all the way. Not Revere, however. He never made it past Lexington.

But even Wadsworth never suggested that Revere was “defending the nation” with his ride, as Palin tried to claim. It should have been obvious to this half-term governor that at this time there was no nation to defend — the Declaration of Independence didn’t come into being until a year later. And where Palin got the idea that Revere’s warnings had anything to do with a colonial form of gun control is beyond any logical explanation.

Fortunately we have writers like Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg who know enough about history to put it all in a proper perspective.