John Dennis (2) (1658–1734)

John Dennis was a Whiggish fuckwad best known for coining the phrase "steal my thunder", starting fights with Pope and Addison and everyone under the sun, and demanding that the Duke of Marlborough insert a clause into the Treaty of Utrecht protecting him, John Dennis, from French vengeance, in perpetuity. He was expelled from university for stabbing a dude and wrote criticism under the name "Furius".


He would also have made a damn good screenwriter--say, for the sequel to Braveheart, or even show more the next Michael Bay movie. The source of his massive paranoia re the French was Liberty Asserted, a vicious, bigoted attack on the esteemed continental cousins as treacherous, venal, craven, and either, in the immortal remark attributed to Churchill about the Germans but appropriate in the most delightfully various of situations, at your feet or at your throat. It's a bush-colonial war story set in "Angie", an Iroquois village (Angie?) and forlorn outpost of the War of the Spanish Succession. Brave Englishmen and loyal citizens of the Five Nations square off against the French and their allies the Hurons (later to become the Sixth Nation, just in case you were wondering how the war turned out). Protests of camaraderie are made, manlily. Two bros fall in love with the same women, but bros-before-youknowwhats, they don't let it come between them, and save each other's lives, homoerotically.


The pacing is excellent, the language is clear and trimmed of fat, and there's even some mildly interesting if spurious attempt to align Whig values with Englishness and ultimately divine sanction, and in so doing refute feudalism/Catholicism/the divine right of kings/smoking Gitanes/all things Gallic, through your usual highly fraught, soap-operatic story about complicated bloodlines. Our chosen-one figure fits somewhere between Jesus and Neo on the messianic flow chart and is half-native and tries to, like, reconcile opposites, as opposed to the colonial crossover move a la Dances with Wolves/The Last Samurai/Avatar.

Oh, and in the final scene his top guyness is signalled by a Pentecostal halo of flames. No special effect is too expensive or crass for John Dennis's sense of showmanship or his pugnacious jingoism, and you'll finish Liberty Asserted amused, dismayed, and sick from too much stale popcorn and fake butter. show less

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