Please repeat, as you do every year, the words (written by Paul Fussell) you try to live by on America’s Independence Day.
“There is one day of the year when America should receive nothing but praise. That’s July Fourth. On all other occasions, those who wish the United States well will vigorously distinguish the good from the bad.”
Why is this important to you?
Everybody deserves a break at least one day out of the year, even a country whose history and present is as checkered as that of America.
So what’s the problem this year?
Well, there’s a lot going on right now. Our president is as incompetent, idiotic, and base as anyone who’s ever held the office, and what he lacks in actual malevolence he makes up for in indifference, allowing a gaggle of some of the worst charlatans and cretins the country has to offer to have their way with the levers of power. The Republican Party has gone from bad to worse, and the Democratic Party seems determined to follow. At the same moment our position as the world’s foremost global power appears to be in jeopardy, the people in control of the country are determined to leave the place uninhabitable as it slides into ignominy. Bad faith is everywhere, solidarity is hard to come by, and the chickens we have sent out to soil the rest of the world are coming home to roost. It’s harder than ever to pretend that there’s anything admirable, or even special, about the country I call home, especially after a trip overseas — always a good tonic for the delusion that your place of birth is the best at everything.
I sense a ‘but’ in the offing.
But…I’ve never seen the point of being harshly critical (dare I even say ‘anti-American’ given that word’s blinkered history of being used as a cudgel against communists? probably not) of this country on Independence Day. It smacks of humorlessness, fun-killing, moral scolding of the worst order; it’s the kind of thing Spank, the cartoonish performance artist played by David Cross on Mr. Show, would do before shitting on the flag. It’s…well, it’s overkill. We have 364 days a year to fill with pointing out how America has used the rest of the world as a dishrag, and as Fussell — a decorated veteran and a patriot without peer — pointed out, we should use every one of them to keep in check our worst instincts. But if there is anything at all that one loves about America, and it is truly a man without a heart who has not a trace of love for his home in his heart, then the Fourth of July isn’t the time to shit on it. Even if your dad is an abusive creep, you can pick a day other than his birthday to tell him that.
And yet…
And yet, I find myself realizing more and more every year that all the things I love about America are things that aren’t really about America at all. More than anything else in the world, I love the endless, boundless grace and beauty of the natural landscape of this astonishingly gorgeous country that stretches from one sea to another; but it was here before America, it will be here after America, and we stole it from the people who were here before us. (Our capitalist class is also doing its best to reduce it to ruin.) While I still believe that the founding of America, and the subsequent inspiration it provided to anti-monarchial movements in other countries, was a unique and praiseworthy event, it must be understood in the context of an enlightenment liberalism that was largely harmful, the perpetuation of a colonial slave state that was pure poison, and the installation of an imperialist and capitalist system that has done far more harm than the wrongs the American Revolution set out to right. There are innumerable things about American culture that I love without reservation, but there is no reason, all else being equal, they couldn’t have happened somewhere else, or in an American not besotted with the racist legacy of slavery. We stopped innovating in the area of human rights almost immediately after we started, and have since fallen behind practically every other country on Earth.
Still, though, there are things you love.
But that’s the point. Almost everything I love about America is something that has nothing to do with being an American, or is something that could exist just as easily somewhere else. It doesn’t make a bit of sense to be ‘proud’ to be an American; no one who was born here had any choice in the matter.
But if there are, as you say, innumerable things about American culture, then surely, even if they are not unique, it shouldn’t be hard to list them on this day when the country deserves only praise.
Oh. Well, if you put it that way, then: Texas barbecue. Chicago blues. Louisiana cuisine. West Coast jazz. Small-town festivals. Professional baseball. Iced tea with lemonade. Some of the greatest writers, filmmakers, photographers, and musicians in the history of the world. How every part of this vast and incoherent country does generally American things in a uniquely local way. The way our most oppressed people managed to turn their misery into one cultural triumph after another. The way our most marginalized citizens have taken the promise of America, however hollow and exclusionary it has proven to be in real life, seriously and at face value and demanded their share of that promise.
Bring it on home and let us sleep under a bursting American sky.
The greatest thing about this country is that here in America — a land stolen and never paid for from people we still treat like garbage today; a land founded on a never-complete guarantee of freedom and equality for all; a land that broke off from an empire and then went on to form its own while pretending it didn’t engage in imperialism; a land drunk on the lie of freedom and rights that immediately abandoned the quest for others to have those things; a land where the liberty of some people was bought in vast amounts of suffering and death for others; a land that embraced capitalism like no other, and that grew fat and cruel out of a delusion that it didn’t cause misery like other ideologies — there have always been people who said ‘It’s not enough’ and ‘Freedom for each must be freedom for all’ and ‘My happiness cannot come at the expense of someone else’s despair’. The greatest thing about America is the people who say ‘America must be better’, and never stop trying to make it so. Happy Independence Day, and never forget that we are all dependent on one another.