Glorious Fourth
Halloween and Fourth of July are my favorite holidays, in large part because they lack any religious subtext and are joyful, not sorrowful events. Unfortunately, the Fourth is in constant danger of being hijacked for partisan purposes or being turned into an imperial celebration of martial might — fireworks, rockets red glare and all that.
Yes, 1776 came at he start of a protracted, bloody revolutionary war, but the event being celebrated today is not the war, but the ringing assertion by the aggrieved colonists that their ancient rights as Englishmen were being usurped. Having sought redress and not received it, they saw no other course than to seek independence.
In other words, they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. However, if the crown and parliament hadn’t been pompous, out-of-touch twits, it could have ended quite differently. We might all still be speaking the Queen’s English, be sappy about the Royals and misspelling words like theatre and labour.
Obviously that didn’t happen, but it isn’t the David and Goliath guerrilla war that matters so much as the ideas behind it, and that tends to get lost in the fireworks, the marching men, the flyovers, the bellicose rhetoric.
The colonists arrived here seeking a better life. In a class system dominated by a squirearchy, advancement was limited. Since only the eldest child could inherit, even upper class younger sons were condemned to social immobility. Members of dissenting religious sects were discriminated against. So dissenters, the economically ambitious and the lower orders trapped in lives of servile penury risked all to come to a land of opportunity.
And they began to build a freer less class bound, more dynamic society. Town meeting democracy in New England, religious tolerance in Pennsylvania, free enterprise capitalism in New York, invention welcomed everywhere and very little regulation anywhere.
When the mother country, which had largely ignored America, woke up and tried to make the colonies into a profitable subsidiary, to impose rules and taxes without corresponding rights and benefits, the independent-minded Americans took it amiss.
But something funny has happened. In the South, the plantation system with slaves instead of serfs sought to mimic the landed gentry of the old country. In time, the industrial robber barons with their wage slaves became a kind of aristocracy of capital. Both sought to protect their privilege by controlling the political system.
How weird that the American landscape is overrun with McMansions that imitate Scarlet’s Tara. How peculiar that our suburban neighborhoods are crisscrossed by streets with “classy” English names — Buckingham, Nottingham, Warwick, Yorkshire, Wellington. Which side are we on?
In the fevered imagination of the political right, we are in constant danger of being subjected to collectivist tyrants out to tax and spend and restrict our liberties. But who do you suppose they represent? In fact, in signifiant ways we seem to have slept while a version of the English class system has reconstituted itself here. Are we represented by a Congress of citizen legislators looking out for the interests of the common man, or are we ruled by a House of Lords — millionaires or their hired lackeys who provide not democracy to all, but special treatment to the highest bidder?
Before we get too misty about the warriors who gave us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it might be worth asking why our own vets receive substandard medical care and paltry benefits while hedge fund billionaires get huge tax breaks. Before the patriotic excitement of the fireworks, it might be a good idea to listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence, if your vicinity offers one, and ask the following question: Are we ruled by the government the Jefferson who wrote the Declaration sought, or the government of the King George to whom it was addressed?