Revolution, War, and an Inalienable Right to Cheese Bagels

Second straight week without the Asiago bagels (see Food Fight entry)... an open insurrection has begun. While we don't have pitchforks and lit torches in hand, de rigeur props for a violent mob, we plan to seize the supply closet and arm ourselves with a cache of Wells Fargo promotional stress balls, highly effective for beaning your fellow team members. "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing" (Thomas Jefferson). How appropriate that I have been watching and thoroughly enjoying the BBC series Rebels and Redcoats on PBS. The series revisits the American Revolution, this time from a decidedly British perspective. And to breathe new life to an old story, the BBC narrative occasionally draws parallels between the American experience in Vietnam and the British experience in the American colonies, both wars lost by more advanced nations and armies. At one point, the documentary makes reference to the fact that St. Paul's Chapel in lower Manhattan, the church where George Washington worshipped on the day of his inauguration as the first President of the Union in 1789, had survived both the siege by the British ships earlier in the Revolution which laid waste to all of the neighboring buildings AND the terrorist attacks, more than two centuries later, on the nearby World Trade Center Towers. In fact, Lower Manhattan, at the mouth of the Hudson River, was the epicenter both for the Revolution and for the 9/11 attacks; ironic that the two principal combatants during the Revolution are now the two principal partners in the post 9/11 "war on terror", most notably in the Iraqi conflict.