Plymouth Woe

Our great and glorious global realm has touted its continuing relevance to the modern world with some squeaking about its status as the birthplace of America. Four hundred years ago, the Mayflower sailed off in a sulk from Plymouth, England owing to some differences of opinion about the pronouncements of an imaginary Middle Eastern tyrant and His heir. Appropriately enough given that the voyage led directly to a pullulant market in smallpox blankets, indigenous Americans were not present at the ceremony; and many real Americans also stayed away in case God offered the same protection to celebrations of the Special Relationship as He habitually bestows upon Trumpster rallies and crowded churches. The tattered remnants of the rah-rah were mumbled over by dignitaries, wheezed over by a band (a military one, in acknowledgement of the peaceable nature of the pilgrimage) and fluttered over by the flags of the United Kingdom and the United States, neither of which existed in the seventeenth century; although the latter would eventually emerge thanks to God, Manifest Destiny and a healthily Johnsonian attitude towards the keeping of treaties.