It Blow'd Up Real Goood!

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Happy "America Kicks Ass" Day
Mykeru.com
July 4th, 2005

Now it's the evening of July 4th, the summer sun has gone down and, befitting Independence Day, one can hear the muffled thump of fireworks. I may even be hearing the celebration occurring in the capital or maybe it's just some independent, albeit illegal, pyrotechnics being set off a few block away. In fact, listening for a bit it must be the latter: There's too long a pause between concussions, mixed in with a comical little pop or two, for it to be professional fireworks being set off to music.

Unfortunately, bombing things really is as American as apple pie. Although one of the founders, John Adams, suggested that fireworks, which he called "illuminations", be used to celebrate independence day, I get the impression that the origin of the tradition is a little more martial in spirit, related to our national anthem celebrating our flag withstanding an artillery barrage.

Not that there's anything wrong with a little pyrotechnics. I grew up at a time when most fireworks were still legal, including some that could have been used for light demolition. That I still have all my fingers and both eyes is a minor miracles of dumb kid luck.

A good number of Americans think key passages from the Declaration of Independence sound to "commie" for their tastes. The Constitution isn't really taken seriously, except when it needs to be changed to combat the republic-threatening menace of gay marriage and the half dozen acts of protest through flag burning that happen every couple years. The very concept of "unconstitutional" has fallen out of favor, and the document itself can be ignored when convenient, as it was in the Supreme Court deciding the 2000 presidential election and with a Congress that has totally abdicated its responsibility to make war and reign in the president's power to instigate wars. In light of all that, one needs something a little uncomplicated to inspire the general public.

Like blowing shit up

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After all, the "post-9/11" world begins and ends with blowing shit up. On 9/11, things got blown up and so, in turn, we felt obligated to blow things up, even things that had nothing to do with the initial spate of blowing things up. Really, the "Shock and Awe" campaign beginning the Iraq war had less to do with any strategic value and more to do with making the folks here at home exclaim "ooh and ahh" like they just saw a string of multicolored air bursts timed to the 1812 Overture. How could we not feel safe while we're blowing shit up, up until the next time that someone is inspired by our blowing their shit up to blow more of our shit up.

Fundamentalist Christians like to complain about the pagan motifs that remain in Christmas, ironically after Christians co-opted pagan festivals. They want, to coin a phrase "Put Christ back in Christmas". Well, similarly, somewhere along the way, the whole point of a day celebrating American Independence got lost, replaced by boasting and bombast, an adjunct to the ongoing American celebration of martial prowess that should be replaced by one all encompassing"We Kick Ass" day just to get it out of our systems in one day-long violent bacchanalia. It would be a hell of a holiday where we get to blow shit up and even run around shooting people at random in the name of liberty.

I suspect that the people behind Independence Day had something of a different idea.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As I recall, that passage is carved in stone at the Jefferson Memorial. Except, for some odd reason, just an oversight, I guess, they left out the bit about "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it". So the bastardization of the Declaration, and the meaning of American Independence has a long, carefully executed history.

One of the signs of corruption, and in this case a betrayed revolution, is when people become the very thing they were rebelling against in the first place. In a very short space of time revolutionaries can become the very complacent establishment they sought to overthrow. Pigs become men and men become pigs. If it can happen to individuals within a lifetime, it's not surprising that it would happen in a couple hundred years to a country. Exactly when our revolution was betrayed is a matter of debate. One can say the American revolution was betrayed in the womb by the inability of the founders to deal with the issue of slavery. Perhaps it was betrayed in the late 19th century when the selfish, inordinately powerful entities of corporations were given the full rights of personhood under the law. Maybe it happened during the World War I Sedition Acts or the Red Scare, which undermined the explicitly stated right of the people to alter or abolish the government. Certainly the passage of anything as totalitarian as the USA PATRIOT Act was the sound of one of the final nails being driven into the coffin, but it can't be considered the first.

Whenever it happened, its clear that we need lots of explosions, bright shiny objects and deafening bombast to hide the fact that we are living under a revolution betrayed where we have given up many of the freedoms that people fought and died for in order to maintain a sort of oppressive peace and the illusion of security. We then compounded our betrayal of the sentiments embodied in the Declaration by confusing patriotism with the most stupid form of thoughtless nationalism that allows us to worship the image of founders like Thomas Jefferson without having to pay attention to a single word he wrote.

Perhaps instead of flag waving and pyrotechnic spectacle, we should make the practice of celebrating the Fourth of July simpler, by making it people's civic duty to read and understand the Declaration of Independence and internalize the thought that Jefferson, a real patriot who found conscience and dissent to be inseparable, expressed in succinct and unequivocal language in other writings which is now, at his memorial, carved in stone:

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

At the very least we should point out to the bombastic uber-patriots, like this incredibly dense fucknugget taken on by Steve Gilliard, that back when the Declaration of Independence was written, there was a group of conservative, God-fearing champions of traditional values in America: Tory monarchists who thought it their sacred duty to kiss King George III's royal ass. Left to those conservatives, this country would still be a British colony. Left to our current crop of conservative, God-boggled, reactionary idiot fanatics thoughtlessly flacking for George the Chickenhearted's cult of personality disorder we'd degenerate into something the founders would never tolerate, which is a dimwitted, malicious theocracy of fools and whores.