The Wordy Shipmates Read Online Free

crazy.”
    Later in the episode it is revealed that the person who gave us Thanksgiving was not Squanto or Plymouth governor William Bradford but rather the Fonz. All the Pilgrims were afraid of the Indians except Pilgrim Fonzie, who was their friend. Then Joanie gets her foot caught in one of Potsy’s stupid beaver traps. (That Potsy.) Remember that thing Fonzie does with the jukebox? Where he whacks it with his fist and the music plays? Turns out that works on beaver traps, too. They open right up. But he won’t free Joanie until everyone renounces their racism and acts nice to the Indians and invites them to dinner. Fonzie? He’s the Martin Luther King of candied yams.
    Mostly, sitcom Puritans are rendered in the tone I like to call the Boy, people used to be so stupid school of history. Bewitched produced not one but two time-travel witch trial episodes—one for each Darrin. They’re both diatribes about tolerance straight out of The Crucible, but with cornier dialogue and magical nose crinkles. The housewife/witch Samantha brings a ballpoint pen with her to seventeenth-century Salem and the townspeople think it’s an instrument of black magic. So they try her for witchcraft and want to hang her.
    Check out those barbarian idiots with their cockamamie farce of a legal system, locking people up for fishy reasons and putting their criminals to death. Good thing Americans put an end to all that nonsense long ago.
    My point being, the amateur historian’s next stop after Boy, people used to be so stupid is People: still stupid. I could look at that realization as a woeful lack of human progress. But I choose to find it reassuring. Watching Bewitched and The Brady Bunch again, I was flummoxed as to why they made such a big deal about Mayflower voyagers John and Priscilla Alden. Then I figured out that those two once loomed so large in the American mind mostly because schoolchildren used to spend every November reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1858 love-triangle poem about the Aldens called “ The Courtship of Miles Standish.” The poem is full of all kinds of hooey, like calling Alden a scholar, even though in real life he was the guy on the Mayflower the Pilgrims hired as their barrel maker. Basically, he was in charge of the beer. And we should expect nothing less from Longfellow, who also poetically pumped up the importance of Paul Revere. There isn’t that much difference between tall tales that start “Listen, my children, and you shall hear” and “Here’s the story of a man named Brady.” In other words, Americans have learned our history from exaggerated popular art for as long as anyone can remember. Revolutionary War soldiers were probably singing fun but inaccurate folk songs about those silly Puritans to warm themselves by the fire at Valley Forge. Right before they defeated that godforsaken General Cornwallis, of course. Man, I hate that guy.
     
     
     
    A search through a sampling of American newspapers from the last few weeks for the word “Puritan” yields the following. An article on how much baby boomers are looking forward to retirement because they’ve always rolled their eyes at the “Puritan work ethic” since their turn on/ drop out youths and thus can’t wait to spend their golden years traveling, volunteering, playing golf, and farming—the article really did say farming, which, I hate to break it to the flower children, is a pretty hard job. A financial analyst, speaking of a recent crackdown on mortgage lending, opines, “ The transition from drunken sailor to being a Puritan was awfully fast.” A profile of painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel claims “Puritan critics” always looked down on the artist’s charismatic joie de vivre. A sports columnist waxes happily that the national ardor for athletic events holds together our otherwise “fragmented society” in spite of “our Puritan forefathers’ deep distrust of any kind of play.”
    I’m always