Two-Hundred and Thirty-One
“Stand back while I celebrate freedom!” - Homer Simpson
It’s the Fourth of July and these days that means loud action movies, crappy television “marathons”, warnings about drunk driving, pious speeches about patriotism from conservatives, indignant speeches about patriotism from liberals, mattress and furniture sales, news stories about heightened security at airports and stadiums, barbeques, baseball games, and colored gunpowder.[1] I’m thankful to be part of a nation that had the foresight to declare independence while the weather is nice. The sun is shining,[2] it’s the longest days of the year, and life is good. Summertime, and the livin’s easy…fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high…
And yet, there seems to be a general mood of gloom in this country. Conservatives are unhappy because the war is going badly, the president they once hailed as their conquering hero is rapidly becoming their worst electoral nightmare, and the Democrats control Congress. Liberals are unhappy because the war exists, their new Congress can’t seem to do anything about it, and the man they hold responsible is still at 1600. Well you know what? It’s Independence Day. Eat a hamburger, drink a beer,[3] watch some fireworks and cheer up.
We’ve had a rough run, there’s no denying that. Bush the Younger has been in office for six years, with unfettered Republican control for four. They were bad years. But what we’ve built since 1776 is a lot stronger than four, six, or eight years, no matter how bad.
Washington, Lincoln and the Roosevelt boys would scoff at the problems we have today. Given a choice between their time and ours they would laugh themselves silly and go to bed each night thanking Providence that they lived in 2007. Our sainted heroes, from Davy Crockett and Sam Houston to Audie Murphy and Omar Bradley, would crash through our problems before breakfast. Martin Luther King would smile at the thought of long lines and photo identification as the remaining tools of disenfranchisement - and start right to work changing them.
I can point to just about any other nation on the planet and see problems so vast and huge that they would make our politicians weep with fear. We fret about housing bubbles and staggering debt loads, but we have a stable, sturdy and enormous economy that creates more wealth and technology than any other. The American military was never designed to fight Iraqi insurgents and shouldn’t have been asked to; nevertheless it’s the strongest, fastest and stealthiest fighting force ever assembled and there isn’t a government on Earth that wants anything to do with the business end of it. It remains heart wrenchingly easy to be born to all but insurmountable disadvantage thanks to sexism, racism and poverty, but compare us to any other large country and see how they’re doing with the same issues. Our environmental problems wouldn’t even register as such in China, India or Russia.
The United States is no utopia. We have a lot of problems that interfere with good people’s pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. We disgraced ourselves and our traditions with our detention policies. We tarnished our protections of free speech and civil rights. We embarrassed ourselves in front of the whole world again and again. We ignored vital issues like making sure that everyone can get to a doctor, remembering that immigrants are what made us great and the warming of the planet. In short, we have behaved very poorly and the consequences are upon us at last. But there’s no place I’d rather be.
The way we’ve treated prisoners in Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, and known unknowns elsewhere is a stain on the Stars & Stripes that will never come out. We have tortured and killed a lot of people. [4] There is no way that all, or even most, of them were guilty of anything.[5] And I’d bet good money that we don’t even know the half of it yet. Our actions from these last few years will be thrown in our face by friends and enemies for decades.
Habeas corpus and the general presumption of innocence have also taken some lumps lately. From illegal wiretapping to secret visits from the FBI it’s a bad era to be innocent but seem suspicious. More people than I thought possible went along with a lot of creepy and illegal stuff, but the more it comes to light the more upset we become. These are fat times for civil libertarians, these are days they’ll look back on fondly as a time when they knew and met the enemy.
Then there are our strained relations with the rest of the world. Arrogance and deceit led us into an unnecessary war that the world opposed, and now we suffer. Our sophomoric imperialism in Iraq is the most embarrassing and well covered, but there are many others. We’ve all but forgotten Afghanistan and the promises we and the rest of the world made there. We’ve enabled the Israelis and Palestinians to dig themselves even deeper into their mutual quagmire. We speak grandly of democracy and freedom but act with craven cynicism should a totalitarian regime have something we want or a democratic government do things we don’t like.
But there is a silver lining to abandoning our principals. Once we go back to them, as we have already begun to do, we do so with the fervor of the converted. We can and should hold ourselves to a standard of humane custody that the world admires; habeas corpus and civil rights should never even be questioned, let alone suborned; peaceful, private communications and assemblies ought to be absolutely unmolested. We deviated from those beautiful ideals just a little these last few years and some are ready to declare the nadir of the Republic. That is a cause for celebration, or rather, it will be in twenty or thirty years when some ex-Guantanamo detainees are standing in the House chamber accepting an apology from some other President.
Back here at home we’ve ignored our system of medical care so completely that even middle class people are feeling squeezed. If you’d told the health care warriors from 1993 that their favorite problem could be allowed to fester for fourteen years without action they wouldn’t have believed you. Today it’s no longer a think tank problem, it’s an existential threat for citizens and businesses. The political will to do something now exists and while our first attempt at a solution won’t be perfect, once we get going in the right direction[6] it’s all downhill.
We’ve also stubbornly refused to acknowledge the realities of immigration in today’s America. Televised grandstanding about the dangers of illegals amounts to little more than jingoistic masturbation. America has benefited from bringing in the best, brightest, and most aggressive from around the globe from long before Independence. We co-opt, assimilate, and seduce newcomers and each one makes us that much stronger, smarter and wealthier. The world is always changing, and with it the people who want to come here. The proper nouns and racial slurs may differ, but immigration has always been with us and unless we screw up real bad it always will be. We need new legislation from time to time to deal with new conditions and new arrivals, but staying open to all ideas and comers and letting the merits decide the thing is as fundamental to us as breathing. We all know it, and sooner or later we’ll work out a compromise that makes everyone unhappy but keeps this crucial traffic incoming.
The Earth those new Americans come from has gotten warmer and parts of it are looking downright inhospitable. But we’re starting to do something about it. Better yet, it’s beginning to look like a problem that can be addressed with technology, and those are our favorite kind. There is money to be made and glory to be had. In fact, there’s so much money on the table that it’s become fashionable to be green. There will be calamities, there will be harm and there are catastrophes that we’re probably too late to change, but we’re on it now.
The system works, ok? It doesn’t work quickly and it ain’t pretty, but on the whole and by and large, it works. Despite the crazy gibberish you see on television from professionally angry pundits, this country is not insane. You can do some insane things if you can manage to fool fifty-one percent of the electorate every other November, but in the end it will catch up with you. The Democrats have done it in the past and the Republicans are doing it now and we’ve not only survived, we’ve flourished.
Foreign people don’t like us, our soldiers are dying for a lost cause, the economy just seems flat, we can’t get anything done internationally because other governments neither like nor trusts us anymore, and the East Asians are loaning us money like we’re speedball freaks on the verge of rehab. We have certainly had a tough go the last few years, but this country is robust as hell. The sloppy, secretive governing of Bush the Younger is no more a threat to our representative democracy than the Free Masons, communism[7], or Walt Disney.
The world will forgive us. They’ll forgive us because we suffered a huge trauma, had the wrong man in charge when it happened, and it knocked us for a spin. They’ll forgive us because in the grand scheme of things if you want to die wealthy and happy there are no better allies to have than Americans. As long as we stick to our guns, the self fellating bullshit we tell our kids about freedom, democracy, tolerance, and even that shining city on the hill, we’ll be fine. We may stray form our ideals, but we love them too deeply to ever let them go. Whatever you may read in the press from either side, we remain no better friend, no worse enemy.
Creating the United States of America was hard work. We stole the best parts of an entire continent, killed uncountable numbers, and went to war against just about every civilized nation on Earth to do it, but we built the greatest country in history, bar none. I can see my own bias when I write that, but I believe it. I really do. As chaotic and incomprehensible as this country is, it’s still the best place on Earth. It was a crazy, fucked up place before I got here, it is a crazy, fucked up place now, and it will probably be a crazy, fucked up place long after I’m gone. On the Fourth of July, I couldn’t be happier about any of it.
[1] Guys with penchants for tights and tricorner hats will also stand in public and read aloud the crimes of King George III.
[2] Yes global warming fans, that is still a good thing.
[3] I’m sure the vegetarian teetotalers can find appropriate substitutes.
[4] It pains me to use the word “we” here but there is no honest way around it.
[5] To say nothing of the fact that no one, ever, deserves some of the things we’ve admitted to doing.
[6] Whatever that may be.
[7] Note the small “c”.
