If you have a fragile ego, you need to avoid intelligent small children like the plague.

My two-year-old niece had heard what people were saying about me, but they wouldn’t say it.

So every time she saw me with a beer in my hand, she would say,

“You’re a DRUMP, Uncle Bob!”

It turned out she was perfectly correct. I WAS a drump.

Big time.

I ended up a couple of decades later in alcohol and drug recovery.

Everywhere I went i was surrounded by other drumps. I gloried in the week-long Afrikaaner braaevleise (?) which put the wildest Texas cookout to shame. They drank what any objective lab would testify was a toxic amount of alcohol and ate steaks held in their hands like hamburgers. For a week or so we all just passed out from time to time and came back to to gorge more and return to the smashed condition.

In Malawi, sort of neutral territory, I took care of a Cubano Commie who was out of his mind drunk. Blantyre, Malawi was neutral territory then. I wouold have killed him and he would have killed me in our normal occupation.

But if you get drunk together, that involves a mutual agreement any other Drump will understand.

During the American Revolution when french officers were over here, several things kept cropping up.

One was the fact that, to a French aristocrat, taking care of business was what your stewards did. It was always curious to them that George Washington knew exactly how each ofhis plantations was doing. He knew the name of eachof his slaves, and he also knew how well they worked.

The idea that a French aristocrat should know how well each of the peasants he lived off of did workwise was as alien to them as moonmen.

Contrary to stereotypes, Frenchmen didn’t drink all that much.

At least by the standards of the Founding Fathers.

Those were pretty heavy standards.

The Frenchmen were always appalled by the constant toasts in hard liquor.

Just as the stereotype is that Jesus never had a sexual thought in his life, the unspoken subtext is that the Founding Fathers never drank to intoxication.

Meanwhile back on earth, it wasn’t unusual for a prominent man in the community to be found son the couch or even on the road smashed out of his mind.

I doubt that Washington ever allowed himself to be seen drunk. But Washington worked hard to be the soul of dignity.

And the record shows that even HIS intake of alcohol would have put us modern mortals in the drunk tank.

In the third world, the people at the front line drank very, very hard.

I survived to end up in recovery.

Most of the people I was with didn’t live long enough to end up in recovery.

It is well known that Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

That is not as much of a coincidence as you might think.

In the old days, a man in his eighties would live until he saw no point in living any more. One of my uncles lived alone, took care of himself, and drove his own car until he was 86. He smoked heavily.

At age 86, Dr. Bruce, my uncle, tried to marry for the third time. He had been married twice before, his beloved wives had die, and he had six children by them. But that year he was rejected by a 75-year-old woman he loved.

So he died.

Obviously Jefferson, who was in his eighties, and Adams, who was in his nineties, were living until July 4, 1825 precisely because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, an event that was being celebrated all over America.

Adams’s last words were, “Jefferson still lives!”

Jefferson, hundreds of miles away, had just died.

All this strikes people as a hell of a coincidence.

Actually it was as natural as gravity.

Both os them had lived until that day. Adams’s last word simply show that he knew that.

The record shows that, by today’s standards, even Adams was a “drump.”

Let me end this aimless set of observations with a final one.

One biography of George Washington I was reading said, “Washington loved fox hunting. But any sensitive person who saw what his dogs did to a fox he had hunted down would never have fox-hunted again.”

I beg to differ. George Washington was also perfectly aware of what that same fox did to a rabbit every day of the week. Unlike the suburbanite historian, Washington was up on the front line of life.

People who condemn hunting are always under the impression that, if it weren’t for the guy with gun, a deer would have died ina Old Deer’s Home.

I am the last person to praise the Tough Guy that the average member of the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation thinks he is.

They are NOT tough.

The French followed Rousseau, who never left Europe and theorized about Noble Savages. The Revolution they made led to terror and Napolean’s absolute rule

Our Founding Fathers had damned few illusions, least of all the illusion that they were The Original Tough Guys.

And their Revolution worked.