Phallocrophobic? Indeed, sad to say, General Custer was stricken his whole life with this sad affliction. Phallocrophobia. The irrational fear of male crows. How devastating it must have been. And in fact, this illness led inexorably to the slaughter at Little Big Horn. On the upside, it served as the inspiration for the well-known ditty, "Ain't no Mountain High Enough." Allow me to explain. Please.
The tragic sickness at first manifested itself innocently enough. The occasional scarecrow placed on Custer's front lawn. The slight blanch at the expression, "as the crow flies." The incomprehensible contempt for natives of the Crow tribe. With time, it began to affect his daily life, and eventually, his military judgment. Surely when his wife began having to decorate the house around the scarecrows placed prominently in each room, including little ones in the water closets and two in the parlor, one could consider the illness to be at the clinical stage. Eventually Mrs. Custer stormed off in a huff and left him to his own devices and hideous decor.
The disease finally impinged upon the flow of history as Custer began to erect a scarecrow at each encampment as his forces moved farther west. Ever larger and larger it became as he descended further into madness, particularly as they moved into the lands of the Crow Nation. By the time Custer reached the Dakotas, the scarecrow towered to a height of more than fifty feet. He dressed it rather dashingly in the deep blue of the U.S. cavalry, to which he was understandably partial. As it grew larger, more and more soldiers were forced to give up their handsome uniforms for the stitching of the enormous scarecrow costume, to the point that more than half the troops saddled up in their skivvies.
Morale deteriorated as the cavalry would come into town and the troops were forced to share uniforms to visit the dance halls, half the men wearing the tunics, the other half the trousers, to the barely suppressed giggles of the dance hall girls. Men who inadvertantly uttered the "C-word" were dealt with severely. One hapless recruit was hanged from the scarecrow for mentioning a dance hall girl's crow's feet as Custer happened by. The cook was whipped and demoted for rustling up a batch of chicken croquets one night.
Needless to say, the gigantic scarecrow posed a threat to Custer's forces, since word had spread across the Great Plains that, where the scarecrow stood, there was Custer. Accordingly, the troops were forced to make camp in valleys, so that the giant scarecrow could not be observed from the horizon. Upon reaching the Little Bighorn area, Custer as usual sent out a scout to find a suitable location to make camp and erect the scarecrow. The scout returned, reported to the General, and said, "Sir! Ain't no valley low enough!!" As fate would have it, the cook, who doubled as the campfire songleader by virtue of his talents on the ukelele, happened to be standing idly by.
Finding no valley, the troops encamped on the open plain. Custer hesitated before erecting the scarecrow, now taller than any building west of the Mississippi. But fatefully, an enormous flock of the dread birds appeared balefully on the horizon, the largest he had ever seen, and the die was cast.
Well, you know the rest. The Apaches swooped down in a yodeling multitude and slaughtered Custer's troops. The lone survivor was the cook, who, seeing that the end was near, accepted his lot, picked up his ukelele, and tried to lead the troops in a last rousing version of Emily Dickinson's The Yellow Rose of Texas. The Apaches, having never seen anyone play a ukelele before, spared him and subsequently integrated a variety of Western ditties into their evening entertainment. Years later, the cook escaped, and, remembering the words of the doomed scout, penned the aforementioned immortal musical masterpiece. |
