Wednesday 27 May 2015

Texas Rising - do we want a silly tele-blip or the Truth?



 
_______________________________________________________ 
     We were afraid that we would be right.  The notion that we would have a reasonable treatment of the reality of the period surrounding the establishment of the Republic of Texas seemed laughable at the outset.   It was laughable....save for being a sad commentary about what could be hidden behind the skirts of a place as Sacred as the Alamo and then trotted out as "entertainment" and "historical drama". 
     They fell into the trap that we suspected.   No matter how good the grass was that they were smoking, or if the Tequila and/or Scotch that they were drinking was 100 years old / certified, it cannot make up for the fact that Emily West Morgan was never in the clutches of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.   She was held in a stockade of Negroes for a while and it was assumed by some of the Mexican officers that she must be a slave, but such was not the case.   She was, once again, a free-born mullata and could not have been part of Antonio's shenanigans.   It is very possible that she never saw him nor he, her.
     Some can speculate that the listening to the songs of the Christy Minstrels of the 1850s (later resurrected as the New Christy Minstrels in the late 1960s and 1970s), about the Yellow Rose of Texas might give licence with a wink and a nod to some invention of a story without facts, but it takes away from the grandeur of the moment.

     Next, showing Juan Seguin as a conflicted Latin, having to co-ordinate with people he hated and mistrusted (the Anglo-Saxons)only because he hated Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and the Centralist Forces of Mexico City more is a ridiculous assumption based in a falsity further based on a hope by those who think that Cesar Chavez was anything more than a hood ornament Kachina Doll to represent Alinsky's drive against normal America.
 

 
 
     These are things that they do not know, but with which those of us who have spent much of our literate lives passively and actively studying the issues of that time and of that place are familiar.   It would behove those who toy with the Truth about the Alamo and the events that succeed it, that after San Jacinto, and promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, Army of the Republic of Texas, Juan Seguin came back to San Antonio as temporary mayor and Commandant of the military district (the largest in Texas during those times).  This would have been in February, 1837.  Only a person of Juan Seguin`s bruises, valour, and position could have accomplished  such a thing as re-establishing true social and legal order in such a devastated place.
     On the 25th of February, Juan Seguin, with much of the garrison under command, almost all veterans of close combat with the vanquished....but most powerful army at that time in North America....formed up and promptly at four o`clock, as the bells began to toll  an entire Battalion carried and/or accompanied the special coffin in good order to the Church of San Fernando.  Other troops, Texas Rangers, and civil guards, civil authorities, clergy, mourners, friends, family members all accompanied the Battalion and Juan Seguin with the coffin borne before them by a squad of pall bearers.
 
     Arriving at the place where Seguin had extracted remains from the ashes and designated them as those of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett some days before, he stopped the huge column of military and civilian mourners and well-wishers of the quick and the dead.
    Priests threw Holy Water around with abandon, a band played a familiar dirge...although there was and is debate about which one it was, and during an appropriate quiet interlude an officer called for a battalion rifle salute....almost unheard of....never in fact seen by any living American or Mexican before or since, I should believe.
     A Battalion in those days could have been anywhere between 500 to 3,000 men.  In the case of The Republic of Texas at that time and in that condition, it was probably  700 men.   In deliberate and cadenced order all fired....once.....then twice......and then the third volley causing a roar to awaken those departed and those to come.
Seguin spoke in English, gesturing towards the coffin, saying "There are your brothers.   Travis, Bowie, and Crockett and others whose valour places them in the rank of my heroes."   And those were in fact the names inside the lid of the coffin which bore the sample of ashes from the same pile that Seguin had ordered engraved to the underside of the lid of the Coffin.
 
     Supposedly, and this is contested, the remains were interred near the altar of the Church of San Fernando, perhaps the most revered of many churches of any denomination in the Republic of Texas.   All notion by the clerics of lack of qualification, were they Romans? were they Protestants, were they any form of theist or Jew or anything?   The priests did not ask or care. 
     Also, among the native population, principally of the White, upper-caste, Mexican/Spanish group there were those who had sincerely supported the Centralists and who opposed the concept of a Republican Government as envisioned by Zavala and Austin.   They prayed to Seguin for safe-conduct to the Rio Bravo at Laredo, which was rendered to them, their effects, children, servants, and any relative who wished to depart.   They were allowed to take their firearms, animals, and were given an escort to a point mid-way to Laredo, and when out of danger of attack by roving Kickapoo and/or their allies the Comanche' they were allowed to continue without escort.   That number of Centralists and company numbered about 70 persons and 200 animals and 30 wagons and such conveyances.
 
     The volley of the battalion can be heard still to this day by every Texian.  Seguin had a motley history after around 1840...much of it caused by the arrogance of the newly arriving German immigrants who considered themselves to be more like Real Texans than people like Geronimo Navarro, the Gonzalez people, or the Sequins, Zaragozas, and their clan around Goliad who had suffered so much at the hands of Lopez de Santa Anna.  We shall delve into this in coming days.
 
     This is the snarling, bitter, Anglo-hating Seguin pictured in the silly film, Texas Rising.....?   He was far more complicated.  He lived in San Antonio where Latin gentlemen had Anglo wives and to a greater degree Anglo (and we use the identifier "Anglo" fairly loosely) men had Latin wives in considerable melting-pot order.  He gained the confidence of the two most unfriendly-to-Latin men around...William Barrett Travis and Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar.
The depiction of Juan Seguin in the film "Texas Rising" is laughable.    The entire film is laughable....there was no "Texas Red-neck, Hill-Billy, White-trash accent" that would make Hollywood people feel comfortable...by assigning the Texans to their troglodyte status.   Accents in English at the time of the period depicted were much more pronounced and came from British English, New England, Tidewater South, Wicklow Irish,  Scottish, etc.   It would have been difficult for various of the speakers of English to have understood one another unless the conversationalists were really ''plugged-in'' to each other's conversation.   Consider Pygmalion/ My Fair Lady as an example.
 
    We have joined even further into the notion that Texas must be allowed, or must take, an independent road to its destiny before Gabriel`s final call.   We are a motley people, united by philosophy and not race, ethnicity, or even a rigid sect or belief.   We see the face of the Great Yahweh and know him to be the controller at least of our Universe, but we are genuinely yielding to anyone`s posture before his/her Cosmic Source of Order.
    The events of 1836 through 1846 should serve as the pattern of our cut.   The Americans have failed by allowing the vote-buyers (money changers) to ruin an entire race of Americans.  The Americans will not agree that spending more tax money than what is brought in is a sin against natural law and against posterity.  They will not defend the walls that form good neighbours, even as they allow porous borders to permit bad neighbours to pillage and ruin.
     We must gain the power to rule ourselves.   And soon.   Please stayed tuned to-morrow because El Zorro has forwarded some moving pictures of Germany shortly after the collapse during the Summer of 1945.   It will stun a person about how intrepid the Germans are, and how those days foreshadowed the dour and oppressive regimes that would follow in Russian controlled Berlin and throughout eastern Germany.
 
El Gringo Viejo.
_________________________________________