“Patchy” turned 25 this month; he was a 35th birthday present to myself, born of a crisis of machismo.

While folks from the Encarnación side of the family tended away from body modification, male members of la familia Hachecristo had been inked from time immemorial.

Among my grandfather’s cohort, border-area back-room bar tattoos had faded to amorphous green blotches on leathery brown forearms. These were succeeded in the next generation by WWII- and Korea-era tats, especially the Eagle, Globe & Fouled Anchor of the Corps. My cousin, Jesus Hachecristo, is a gallery unto himself. But I resisted until my sister had two, and my machismo pitched a midlife crisis.

Patchy was inspired by Calico Jack Rackham’s flag, and a novelty Jolly Roger from a Wisconsin Dells gift shop. “No Quarter” is the equivalent cry of “No Mercy” or “Take No Prisoners! “No quarter asked! None Given!”

Kill the bloody bastards.

Machismo Intensifies! Crisis Averted!

The origin of the phrase is contested, but the word “quarter” was likely in reference to providing food and shelter for prisoners, much the same as the English government used to “quarter” troops on the American colonies.  The English, including the colonists, abhorred a standing army, considering it a threat to civil liberty. Rarely were soldiers quartered in anyone’s house, but the colonies were responsible for providing the facilities and the supplies to maintain the troops who were ostensibly there to protect them.

Quartered Troops Protect Bostonians

So abhorrent was this affront to every upstanding Englishman in America that they quit being Englishmen altogether. The Declaration specifically calls out the quartering of troops in its laundry list of King George’s tyrannical naughtiness. And the Third Amendment bans the practice of quartering troops. That’s 10% of the Bill of Rights!

Such was the civilian fear of professional soldiery in our nascent nation, that despite the English, Spanish and French actively in armed contention to steal the same dirt from the same original inhabitants as the US, we would not field a standing army.

Nope, we crowd-sourced our conquests. Hence, the Second Amendment.

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The people kept the arms because that’s defense on the cheap. They occupied an ever-expanding militarized border zone, parading with their local militia bros after church because no one had invented softball yet.

This naive romanticized view of the citizen soldier, the Sunday Cincinnatus, reached its climax when 600,000 local militiamen killed one another ushering in the birth of the modern army in the Civil War.

The need for the Third Amendment never arose. It’s never been the cause or remedy of a single Supreme Court case. The need for the Second Amendment is also past, because we have a standing Army now, and a Navy and a Marine Corps and an Air Force and a Coast Guard and gawdelpme a Space Force, all with their own tattoos.

Both Amendments are overdue for retirement, as well as several other provisions in the Constitution.

But don’t you dare touch the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal.  Because yes, I am a pirate…

Two hundred yadda yadda yadda