I love the 4th of July. I am, unabashedly, a massive patriot, a proud citizen, and a huge fan of the people who built and rebuilt and again rebuilt the United States. Flaws and all. Even, to some extent, the ones I think were awful in important ways.
So much so that I’m going to try to write a normal 4th of July item even with all good reasons over the last week to question whether any of this will hold into the future.1
My theme on this day is always the same. The emphasis on this holiday should be on the virtues of politics and political action. While I’m all for celebrating the armed forces on Veterans Day and Memorial Day (and Armed Forces Day, and I suppose the Super Bowl and the World Series…we celebrate the military quite a lot), I don’t think it’s at all central to what we should care about on this day.2
Every nation has armed forces, after all. But the United States of America is unusual in that we began “dedicated to a proposition.” Not to a people, or to a land, but by We the People, trying to “establish justice” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty” and lots of other great stuff.
And when they got it wrong — and oh wow did they make mistakes — we had a “new birth in freedom” and another, then another, and another, and more and, yes, we’re going to need more. Because we also keep screwing up. And because politics works that way: Even at our best, we’re still going to fall short lots of times. Maybe most of the time.
We can keep trying, however, because of those Blessings of Liberty - the blessings of public liberty, the freedom to take part in collective self-government. And from that we have the potential to win public happiness, the feelings of meaningfulness, satisfaction, and joy that political action can give us and that the revolution demanded should be available to everyone. Even if their idea of “everyone” was horribly wrong.
Public liberty also gives us the opportunity to have heroes, political heroes, and celebrate their political greatness, as we do in the city named for Washington where we build monuments to him, to Jefferson, to Lincoln, to Roosevelt, to Eisenhower, to King.3 And as we do at a smaller scale across the nation, so that here in San Antonio, I can go watch a baseball game as Wolff Stadium, named after one former mayor and county judge, and play pickup ball or walk over the cool land bridge at Hardberger Park, named after another mayor.4
Of course, one doesn’t need to have a democracy to name things after famous people, but there’s a difference — oh, absolutely there is — between citizens choosing to honor their fellow citizens and a set of rulers deciding which of themselves to glorify.
Being a particularly political nation means we always have the possibility of working together to try again. Politics is never about perfection, but it always holds the possibility of something better. Something, at the very least, authored by us, not imposed on us. That’s an enormous value in that, even when the choices aren’t all that great.
Perhaps we’ll lose that. But until we do, I’ll honor and celebrate it on the 4th.
I’m working on a larger project about democracy, and frankly had some difficulty motivating myself to continue after the recent Court rulings…until I decided to take my inspiration from A Canticle for Lebowitz and that recent play about a Simpsons episode surviving the apocalypse. Not that I’m expecting an apocalypse! Or that if we do have one that my piddling stuff will be what survives. But it got me writing.
And I’m also a fan of baseball and jazz and many more wonderful US cultural achievements, and scientific and economic and all the other accomplishments. Celebrate them today! Listen to Satchmo and Mingus and Monk and Little Richard and the O’Jays and the Ramones and The Muffs and Los Lobos or whoever you love and watch a ballgame and, I don’t know, go to a mall food court. But the 4th, to me, is about politics above all.
Yes, two of them were generals, and two others were notable commanders-in-chief. But all of them are and should be known for their political skill, including in war.
Okay to be honest I haven’t myself walked over the land bridge, but I’ve heard very good things. And I have played pickup ball on the basketball courts.