Thursday, August 04, 2022

Remember The....Lost Cannon Of Gonzales?

$10 if Cruz can explain the Gonzales Battle Flag*. (And the point of wearing boots with that flag on them (does he never change his boots?) when it can't be seen unless he tucks his pants into his boots (Hint: he'd better not.))

*Here, I'll quote from Forget The Alamo, a book I'm sure Cruz has never read:

The nearest cannon in American hands was at Gonzales, seventy miles east [of San Antonio]; it had been given to the town to ward off Comanche attacks years earlier. Ugartechea sent a squad to fetch it, but the American alcalde refused to hand it over and buried it.  On October 1, a Mexican force of two hundred arrived, upping the ante.  Texas militiamen, smelling a fight, were already pouring into Gonzales.  There was a lot of yelling back and forth.  Some smart-aleck American made a flag with a picture of the cannon and the words "Come and Take It." Thus was born the Texas T-shirt industry; to this day, it's hard to spend a half hour in Dallas or Houston without seeing a "Come and Take It" tee.

Forget The Alamo: The Rise and Fall of An American Myth, by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford.  Penguin, 2021.  p. 61.

As for the battle, there wasn't one.  On October 2 the "Texians" opened fire on the Mexican troops.  200 Mexican troops were soon 800, but they withdrew to San Antonio.  The Texians took that as a victory.  No surprise; to this day they think the Battle of the Alamo was a victory, instead of an almost useless massacre.

So it's fitting that Cancun Cruz wears a reproduction of the flag of a non-battle for a buried (now lost forever) cannon, on the back of his boots.  I still wonder if he has them on every pair of boots he wears to the Senate, or if he just doesn't go to the Senate that often.  Obviously he wasn't wearing them that day, so maybe he's really just a poser.

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