Conservative pundit Rod Martin has delivered an excellent essay about Crockett and the heroes of the Alamo, which you will want to read and ponder. He focuses on an angle I had never considered: how different the United States and the world might be today if those stubborn and courageous rebels had not taken their stand.

I have been re-watching a lot of time travel stories lately, including the “Terminator” trilogy, Stephen King’s “11/22/63,” the “Star Trek” episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Hot Tub Time Machine”and, of course, the best of them all, the “Back to the Future” trilogy. The so-called “Butterfly Effect” is now firmly rooted in the public’s consciousness (“Jurassic Park” helped with that), and Martin, after rebutting the arguments of the anti-Alamo historians, makes a strong case that the battle was a crucial butterfly:

“But beyond the unquestionable rightness of the Texian cause, the successful Revolution served to answer the burning geopolitical question of that era, namely, would America or Mexico — and would liberty or tyranny — dominate the New World?

“Santa Anna had proclaimed himself “the Napoleon of the West”:  his ambitions were vastly greater than just holding a few farms on the Brazos.  Had he imposed his tyranny on the Texians, he would have been liberated to threaten — and possibly conquer — New Orleans, the continent’s single most strategic point.

“Had Santa Anna taken New Orleans, he would have reversed Jefferson’s achievement in securing the Louisiana Purchase and accomplished what the British in 1815 could not: the reduction of the United States to a servile position. And with all commerce in the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi river basins bottled up at Santa Anna’s mercy, not only might America never have generated the capital, industrial strength and military might needed to become a great power, but an authoritarian Mexico might well have supplanted it, expanding throughout the West and the Caribbean Basin as well.

“But for Houston’s victory at San Jacinto — but for Davy Crockett’s martyr’s death at the Alamo, enabling Houston’s triumph — the American experiment might well have come to nothing.  America might well have been recolonized in that era of global European expansion which saw India and China subjugated (as indeed Mexico was by France for a time, during the 1860s). And with the coming of the 20th Century, freedom might well have perished from the Earth….”

Of course, today’s anti-American progressives might argue that would have been a good thing.

Remember the Alamo.

And thanks, guys.