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1/ Just a thread about the idiom "last ditch" and it's meaning for tomorrow. A huge number of our idioms are the relic of conscripted and press-ganged soldiers and sailors returning home from the wars of centuries past and bringing technical terms learned there to civilian life.
2/ "Clean bill of health," "turn the corner" and "loose cannon" are all naval terms from the age of sail.
"Loose cannon" is one of my favorites. Cannon weighed tons. They were carefully lashed down but if one got loose, usually due to battle damage, it was life and death.
"Loose cannon" is one of my favorites. Cannon weighed tons. They were carefully lashed down but if one got loose, usually due to battle damage, it was life and death.
3/ They rolled around on the deck of the ship with the waves, crushing anyone or anything in their path. If they weren't stopped, eventually they'd find their way to an open deck hatch and go plunging straight through the decks and out the bottom sinking the ship.
4/ "Last ditch" is the one I wanted to talk about though. It's a reference to trench warfare, which had been practiced in sieges for centuries but the phrase really came into the language after World War I.
This is how the trench system worked:
This is how the trench system worked:
5/ Typically, there were three lines of trenches of parallel trenches, connected by parallel trenches. There was the front line, the support trench and, behind those, a reserve trench. To attack this system with just a rifle in your hand and a metal pot on your head was deadly.
6/ Most of the time, the result was slaughter of the attackers. But sometimes, breakthroughs happen. If they did and the enemy got down in the trenches with you, you retreated to the support trench while the reserves there covered you, took up positions and resumed fighting.
7/ If everything really went to shit, you went back to the reserve trench. When you were in the reserve trench, you were in what "Sun Tzu" called "death ground," ground from which there is nowhere else to retreat. Here was his advice about dealing with different kinds of ground:
8/ “In difficult ground, press on; In encircled ground, devise stratagems; In death ground, fight.”
The reserve trench was literally the last ditch.
To run was ruin. You'd get shot in the back. And surrendering in the middle of a battle is, historically, a perilous thing.
The reserve trench was literally the last ditch.
To run was ruin. You'd get shot in the back. And surrendering in the middle of a battle is, historically, a perilous thing.
9/ When the Founders, bless their wealthy, elitist, often slave owning, hearts, were putting together the Constitution, their greatest fear was the emergence of someone like Trump, some greedy, characterless, treasonous bastard who'd sell out the country for a shilling.
10/ They put in all sorts of mechanisms to try to deal with that threat-separation of powers, the federal-state division of powers, impeachment. But ultimately, the final defense, the one that matters, was the people. They are, and were always intended to be, the final defense.
11/ We're it. We're all that's left. Every other institutional barrier to tyranny has broken and failed. Every trench has been overrun and we're the bloody, broken bruised bastards in the reserve trench, the death ground of the last ditch.
12/ That's where we are. Those are the stakes: life or death, metaphorical for some but literally for more of us than we now know. Last ditch. Running gets you back-shot, surrendering gets you bayonetted.
13/ If you haven't voted yet, FFS, mask up and do it. And if they try to steal it, we're on death ground. You know what to do.
