Forget the Alamo!

Happy Birthday, America! You’re turning 249, and showing every sign of old age: confusion, anger, bad decision-making, memory loss… And one thing we might consider forgetting is the Alamo.

I’ve been there three times. I learned all about it in school. And yet the only thing I can remember is “Remember the Alamo!” It’s fun to say. “Remember the Alamo!” I just don’t remember what I’m supposed to remember.

They tried to make it easy on us – they made two blockbuster movies about it. One starred John Wayne, and it’s his biggest flop ever. The other starred Billy Bob Thornton and it’s the reason you don’t see more movies starring Billy Bob Thornton. It lost a hundred million dollars.

Part of the problem is it’s a depressing story. We lost. We lost big! Roughly two hundred Americans took on two thousand Mexicans and everyone on our side died.

One of the great heroes of the Alamo was Jim Bowie. It’s pronounced Booey, even though it’s spelled Boh-ee, like David Bowie. Although David Bowie pronounced his name Bau-ee, but everyone said it wrong. That wasn’t even his real name – he was born Davy Jones, but that name was taken by another androgynous British pop star. For the Monkee Davy Jones, the name was real but the band was fake.

Where the hell was I? Oh right, Jim Bowie, best remembered as the inventor of the Bowie knife. And what’s a Bowie knife? It’s that thing invented by Jim Bowie. These are the kind of circular facts we learned in grade school – you think you know two things when really you don’t know anything. And for the record, the Bowie knife may actually have been invented by Jim’s brother Rezin. Rezin? I thought he invented the bong! Hi-yo!

One of the great stories of the Alamo is the death of Jim Bowie. He was sick at the time of the siege -- he asked to be strapped to his bed and propped up against the wall so he could shoot at incoming Mexican soldiers. It’s an inspiring tale of valor and quite possibly pure bullshit. Nobody knows.

The big hero of the Alamo was Davy Crockett. Or maybe it was Daniel Boone. It was some jerk in a coonskin cap. Fess Parker played both of them. Fess probably wanted to do Hamlet, but they wouldn’t let him play it without a dead raccoon on his head.

What we do know is these brave men died fighting for the Alamo, which wasn’t even theirs. It was a Mexican garrison and not a particularly good one.

The Texians – that’s what they were called Texians – took it over after the Mexians… sorry, Mexicans left. They didn’t want it. Mexican leader Santa Anna described it as “an irregular fortification hardly worthy of the name".

Santa Anna, by the way, is the most interesting character at the Alamo. He was President of Mexico ELEVEN TIMES. He lost a leg in battle, and sent it back to his hometown for a parade. You can see his artificial leg in a museum in Illinois. And the most amazing fact of all…Santa Anna is the man who introduced chewing gum to America! I can remember that, but I can’t remember the Alamo

So here’s the story, in brief: a lot of Americans died protecting something they didn’t own against people who didn’t want it. But at least we were fighting for a noble cause: freedom. The freedom to own slaves. These proud Americans gave their lives for the right to enslave other proud Americans.

Once the world figures this out, San Antonio is in big trouble. Because they’ve put the Alamo name on everything in the city: six hundred different businesses from Alamo Church of Christ to Alamo Rent-a-Stripper. My Texian friend Jeff Martin even has an uncle named Alamo. It sounds cool, but Alamo is Spanish for cottonwood tree. Ha! His name is Uncle Cottonwood Tree.

So maybe it’s best that we don’t remember the Alamo all that well. The truth is messy and confusing and not always true. San Antonio could learn a lesson from Belfast, Northern Ireland. That city prides itself as the People Who Built the Titanic. They have museums and monuments celebrating their achievement. And they ignore the fact that the Titanic wasn’t a totally successful piece of shipbuilding. Their attitude is “She looked good as she was leaving here, and that’s the last we ever heard of it.”

San Antonio’s Bart Simpson Building.

The Alamo is a very nice place to visit. You can’t miss it: it’s smack-dab in the middle of downtown San Antonio. And it’s the exact size and shape of a Taco Bell. Admission is free, and they have a museum filled with great historical artifacts. Many are on loan from the world’s foremost collector of Alamo memorabilia. Do you know who it is? He’s very famous. I’m going to give you ten thousand guesses and you still won’t get it right.

It’s musician Phil Collins. He’s the third British pop star to appear in this Alamo article. What’s going on here?

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