Yeah, it is.
I have the ill fortune (merely by the fact that it's so depressingly dull) to be pretty much entirely German as far as I've yet cared to trace my lineage back. A big spatio-temporal mixing of Kiesels, Conrads, Kramers, etc. Must account for why I love bratwurst so much maybe? Though I dislike sauerkraut. Go figure.
I'm not sure how Michigan State was, but we've got a handy little portion of campus here at Purdue (and yes, I am a student here still) that is designated as an open public speaking area. When the weather is nice, we get any of myriad preachers, fanatics, loonies and sane preachers of God's word. I have a signed pamphlet from Brother John Gilles. The pamphlet itself details how he was converted to Christ at a Van Halen concert. (during the song "Running with the Devil", no joke!) I brought this up to him to sign, as I was vastly amused by his antics. He looked at me with an apraising gaze, eyebrow lifted and said:
"What kind of person are you?"
"I don't know."
"Well, do you do drugs?"
"No sir."
"Do you fornicate?"
"No sir."
"Do you listen to rock and roll music?"
*grinning*"Yeahhhhhhh."
*tsk tsk tsking as he writes*
And so I am the proud owner of the John Gilles Story, autographed 'Repent you rock and roll freak. -Brother Jim' :)
I had thought that the colonial Americans were British citizens (on paper at least) until the Revolution. Of course, colonials were not given the full measure of rights that British citizens had, and hence the revolt.
(As an addendum, I'm aware that there were a host of interlocking and interesting causes for the revolution, some of them quite seemy, but my main question was that I hadn't been under the impressing that we didn't truly "cut the apron strings" of citizenship until the revolution. And we didn't finish severing the ties of culture, among the rich of America at least, until later then that even. As always, I'm completely open to new info and interpretations.)
I am off to bed I hope. My girlfriend and I just got back from a gig my band had, and I'm just a hair on this side of passing out from exhaustion.
Take care, and sleep well,
-Tom |
