The Mystery of San Pasqual

The Mystery of San Pasqual

This morning I got sucked into a debate that I would rationally generally avoid. I have joined Next Door, which is an app for local communities allowing people in the same neighborhood who might not know each other to share important information and, presumably, operate more like a real community. I mostly ignore or only lightly notice the neighborhood postings on Next Door since they are mostly about lost dogs and identifying this snake or that varmint from a photo. I did use Next Door to find Handy Brad, for which I am inordinately grateful. In fact, I just got out of the hot tub for the first time in two days since Handy Brad had replaced and grouted about twenty tiles on the tub rim that had come loose from the job done by the professional spa people a few years ago. He did a wonderful job that looks to be much better and neater than the job the pros had done.

It’s a Sunday morning of the long Memorial Day weekend. This is a particularly confusing holiday since we have now been locked down for ten weeks out here in our new paradise and while we are planning a small get-together to celebrate (Kim’s brother and my sister), it doesn’t exactly feel like the normal parade-filled start of the summer holiday season. When Kim and I took a ride yesterday evening (at my urging since I hadn’t been out and about in over a day), we dropped off some avocados to Jeff and Lisa and then decided we would take Cecil on a walk through the San Pasqual Battlefield out by the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The Safari Park is a regular go-to place for us when relatives and especially kids visit. It is nearby and it is world-class. Seeing the baby elephants, the cheetah runs and the beta-male antelope that cannot figure out how to get to the female herd around the alpha-male, are all favorites of ours. But those animals, who are all happily there getting used to NOT being gawked at, are not yet open for public viewing. But the San Pasqual battlefield is usually a lonely little-known spot where there is a viewing patio and a small tourist hall that overlook the scene of the 1846 Mexican-American War battleground.

What makes the San Pasqual battlefield and history so interesting (besides that it is a nearby drive from us and close to the Safari Park) is that both sides of the skirmish claim victory. The War was declared by President James Polk, one of the great proponents of Jacksonian Democracy and the concept of Manifest Destiny. He was considered a great expansionist and very certainly expanded the boundaries of the nation, exactly as he promised in his electoral platform. Besides negotiating Oregon from the British, he pushed the country west from Texas (I guess he remembered the Alamo) to California. In fact, he ordered General Stephen Watts Kearny to march his Dragoon Battalion west from Kansas (Why is Kansas always the origin of aggression?) to California, a mere record-setting march of 2,000 miles.

About 100 Dragoons engaged about 100 local Californios of mixed Mexican and Indian descent. This was Manifest Destiny pitted against the home-defending local landowners and inhabitants. The Dragoons felt that the prior success of Commodore Stockton and other expansionists in Northern California made it abundantly clear that the indigenous/Hispanic residents of San Diego should just roll over and play dead to the show of force from these elite American fighters from the East. Might makes right and Americans felt they had the might to be right. But after the first day of fighting, Major Andres Pico of the Presidial Lancers Los Galgos (The Greyhounds) inflicted on the Dragoons 19 casualties where only 6 Californios met their fate that day. We all know who won the war and there is no way to fully understand if that was a good or bad thing in the course of history, but the skirmish itself remains contestable, which is what makes the battlefield, considered one of the best preserved in the West, so interesting to visit.

On the Next Door email chain this morning there was an aggressive out thrust (probably originating from Kansas) that suggested that with only 223 deaths in San Diego (population 3,500,000), it was time to end this “silly” lockdown. What ensued was an avalanche of volleys back and forth, and I must admit that I did engage. I told of my hilltop neighbor that came up dead and then tested positive for COVID-19. I suggested that this pandemic could get at any of us and that it was serious enough to warrant care and procedural adjustment to masks and social distancing. Them was fighting words to the Dragoons in the neighborhood. A retired virologist weighed in on the side of science and the clear argument that this was a serious and deadly virus that needed to be taken seriously. The Dragoons in the hood argued that the flu kills as many, quoting an article showing that in a harsh season the flu recently killed 61,000 compared to the 60,000 killed to date by COVID-19. Oops, time for a data update showing that 98,000+ updated deaths in three months makes that argument somewhat moot. The Dragoons then used the normal defense of overstatement, suggesting that most of the deaths weren’t really COVID-19 deaths.

I tolled more positive support than the Dragoons, quoting Darwin and saying that howling at the moon for a lost lifestyle was not a smart strategy. The winning volley (in my humble Californios opinion) was from a woman who is an ICU nurse detached now for three months to 100% COVID-19 work. Before heading off to bed after a 24-hour shift she stated that she had personally “bagged” over 223 deaths that she was certain were COVID-19 deaths because she had attended to them. Naturally that didn’t stop the know-it-alls from ranting about the benefits of hydro-chloroquine and why those deaths might have been preventable by proper treatment. I was waiting for the argument that this would all have been worse had Hillary been President. Luckily, there was a pharmacologist in the battle who could call bullshit on those nonsensical conspiracy citations being given. Unfortunately, when the dust settles on this skirmish, no matter how convincing the arguments or how many casualties lie on the battlefield from either side, I fear that like at San Pasqual, the feelings run so very deep and both sides feel deeply righteous in their stances that both will be declaring victory. I cannot decide if I am more upset by the stupidity and uncaring nature of the Dragoon arguments or by the tragic rift which exists in our collective sensibilities. An observation is that the Dragoons are staffed by three men for every woman and the Californios are staffed inversely by three women for every man.

I think the biggest personal quandary for me is whether its worth it to engage in these arguments. I am blue and I live in a sea of red. Part of me says that my day-to-day life is better if I avoid such skirmishes, even online. The other part of me says that avoiding such skirmishes and not working with every ounce of my soul to convert people from the dark to the light would be wrong. But in the end, who is to say what is the light and what is the dark? The landowners of San Diego, who probably spent years abusing the poor mestizos and indigenous population felt they had a God-given right to the land for which they had given blood, sweat and tears. To the Dragoons, they were on a mission from the High Tower in Washington D.C., which was the beacon of light in an otherwise barbarous world of an as-yet untamed continent. They had crossed the nation, subduing the tribes and pushing the Mexicans south and that was the right thing to do under the banner of heaven (yes, there was a Mormon contingent in their ranks). I admit to confusion and end by saying that our Saturday outing fell short as the San Pasqual Battlefield was still closed by the state of California due to the pandemic. So, I must wait for another day and maybe an entire other time to solve the unsolvable mystery of San Pasqual.