By Edwin Cooney
What
you’re about to read wouldn’t have been possible had I not come across a
delightful article in the New York Times last Sunday, July
2nd, 2017. Since I did find and read the article by David Segal, a Times
Business Reporter, you’re about to benefit from Mr. Segal’s research and a
great patriot’s heritage and, most of all, his wisdom.
Exactly
where I met with this great patriot, Mr. Yankee Doodle the Seventh, for
national security reasons has to be a secret. All I can tell you is that it was
in a small town in New England. He was astride a huge white stallion and he
bore a striking resemblance to George Washington except that throughout our
interview he was cracking and chomping down on walnuts with strong white teeth
that clearly weren’t wooden, or false, in any way.
“What
brings you to town this July 4th, Mr. Doodle?” I asked quizzically.
“Today’s
my birthday,” Doodle responded most proudly. “Strangely enough, since the birth
of Yankee Doodle my great, great, great, great grandfather back on Thursday, July
4th, 1776, all of my Yankee Doodle ancestors were born on the Fourth of July.”
“Wow,” I
gasped. “what a coincidence that is.”
“No
coincidence,” Doodle insisted. “It’s pure destiny designed by nature to keep
those British aristocrats sufficiently humble, since it was they who derided
the perfectly respectable name Yankee Doodle back in the 1770s. You see, back
then all armies composed songs in derision of battlefield opponents. The
Macaroni society was made up of a bunch of British swells and, as I understand
it, wore the Italian pasta in tall hats as a mark of upper European
aristocratic identification. Hence, during the early stages of the
Revolutionary War, those Red Coats loudly sang Yankee Doodle as they rode into
battle. The purpose was to demoralize the good citizens of Lexington and
Concord throughout April of 1775. It was pure arrogance through and through, of
course, because while they sang that silly ditty they were riding in a straight
line through our Minute Men, who were gathered behind the trees and in the
bushes picking them off one and two at a time, thus insuring our success rather
than their goal to confiscate our large cash of armaments stored in Concord,
Massachusetts. By the time we surrounded them and then drove them off Breed’s
Hill (it wasn’t Bunker Hill), we’d even appropriated their derisive song. After
all, showing them up as decisively as we had, we were proud to be Yankees or,
if you prefer, Yankee Doodles!”
“What was
a Yankee and what was a Doodle?” I next inquired.
“A Yankee
was a withering British definition of a colonist. A Doodle was another word for
a rube or a fool. As for the pony, the idea was that Yankee Doodle rode a pony
passing it off as a horse and stuck a feather in his cap hoping to look like
the British aristocrat Macaroni,” said Yankee Doodle the Seventh grinning
broadly.
“Since
your great, great, great, great grandfather Yankee Doodle was born in 1776, he
was obviously too young to participate in the Revolutionary War, so did he
participate in any other significant patriotic event?” I asked.
“Of
course, he did. Furthermore, all seven of us Yankee Doodles have taken a
patriotic hand in American history. Some of these roles were a bit obscure, but
we took part in them nevertheless,” exclaimed the latest Doodle.
“What
were some of them?” I queried.
“Well,
great, great, great, great grandfather Doodle was part of the fire brigade that
put out the fires at the capital and at the president’s house that were set by
the British in 1814. My great, great, great grandfather Doodle, who was born on
Friday, July 4th, 1806, was the president of the first bank to go bust during
the Panic of 1837. He never went back to banking. He decided, after all, that
he should have stuck to farming. His son, my great, great grandfather Yankee
Doodle the Third, who was born on Monday, July 4th, 1836, much to his distress,
wrote an editorial in his small town New England newspaper, which went out of
business right after that, that predicted that there would be no Civil War. As
for my great grandfather Yankee Doodle who was born on Wednesday, July 4th,
1866, his distinction, or perhaps national obscurity, was that he was assigned
to care for Theodore Roosevelt’s horse which he rode up Kettle Hill in 1898
during the Spanish-American War. (Note: San Juan Hill was the name of a group
of hills nearby Kettle Hill mistakenly reported as the place of the charge of
Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt. Kettle Hill was the precise place of TR’s
triumph.)
Granddad
Doodle, who was born on Saturday, July 4th, 1896, helped conduct the 1936
presidential poll that predicted that Alfred M. Landon would defeat Franklin
Delano Roosevelt for re-election. As for my dad, who was born on Sunday, July
4th, 1926, he had the distinction of casting the first vote that Nixon, the
loosing candidate, received on Election Day of 1960.
“Fascinating!”
I goggled, “So that leaves you. What’s your obscure or not so obscure role in American
history? As I calculate the Doodle pattern of birth, you were born on
Wednesday, July 4th, 1956. That makes you a reasonably young 61 years old. That
gives you plenty of time to make your obscure or not so obscure national mark.”
“I have
yet to make my mark, but I’m drawing up a plan,” exclaimed Doodle. “Here’s what
I’m considering. How would it sound if President Trump were to announce in a
week or two that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was being replaced by
Yankee Doodle the Seventh?”
My
response was simple and direct. “It would really be electric if you rode that
horse, stuck a feather in your hat and called it Macaroni. Were you to do that,
you might well become the most popular man in the Trump administration. The
Democrats would love you for that. As for how the president would take it is
anybody’s guess. My guess is that he’d tweet like a Trump-Doodle bird!”
RESPECTFULLY
SUBMITTED,
EDWIN
COONEY
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