Independence

This year's national birthday celebration seemed very...troubling.

It was hard to wave a flag and celebrate the nation's government that has spent the past half-year speed-running every fucking thing that provoked the white guys who mattered in the British colonies to piss and moan about their government to the point of rebellion:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

What the actual fuck has Donnie Dollhands done that his counterpart George of Hanover didn't? Substituted his immigration Gestapo for "foreign Mercenaries"? Yeah, right.

Is there any particular reason that anyone not completely in the basket of deplorables would WANT to be part of that shit? The 1776 crowd would have rebel against his ochre-colored ass as they did against the king of their day, and we owe it to them to rebel against the modern version of German George.

Fuck that 1776 noise; there's an old school 1789 solution to King Trump, and rather than bands and fireworks, using it on him and a whole bunch of the crowd of MAGAts clustered around his golden throne seems like a much more joyous use of the day we mark the founding of this nation.

Because the country I served, the country I believe in, is the mirror image of the white man's neighborhood Trump and his the Trumpers believe in.

It's the one where anyone can be "American". No matter who they are, no matter where they were born, no matter what language they speak. All that's required is a fervent, passionate belief in the ideals of this country; equal justice under law, the republic that the foundational documents - ALL the documents, including the important changes wrought by the Civil War amendments that define the Second Republic from the slave-holding First - promises.

Ken ("Popehat") White has a moving story about what that means - or meant - in practice:  

"The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not...I am just more acutely aware that doing better will not be easy and may not be peaceful, and that doing it will require fighting people just as dedicated to low and ugly values, and that we may lose.

America’s history is the story of people — like those Filipino-Americans — who had much less and faced far more daunting circumstances and kept fighting. It would be shameful to give up that fight. The bullies may win, but they will not win by default, and they will not win without a bloody battle."

The thing is...I'm old. Dying slowly of a neurological disease. Tired of "fighting", fighting what is now the weight of my own government. Tired of re-fighting battles I thought we'd won and settled long ago.

Last night sort of reminded me how ridiculous this nonsense all is.

Several years ago the City of Portland passed an ordnance prohibiting personal fireworks during the summer. It made total sense; we're highly flammable in July. Turning thousands of knuckleheads loose with pyro? NOT a good idea.

For years the family used to go north to Washington - where "projectile"-type fireworks were legal - and haul back a load of mortars, rockets, and roman candles to fire off in the blacktop playground behind Astor Elementary School. 

It was a critical part of "fun" on the 4th, history and patriotism be damned. It was all about the pyro.

But the City was right; it's a damn dumb idea. So they banned it.

Well, turns out that here, in the neighborhood around my new condo in the Lower Depths of St. Johns, we laugh at your silly fireworks ban, Portland. The firefight was in full swing moments after sundown.

At which point, sitting out on my porch to admire the lawlessness, I discovered two things:

1) Someone in the demo site down at the end of the street had some really BIG explosives. Either a seriously big-ass mortar or just the old "M-80" quarter-stick dynamite-type charges we used to use to blow our fingers off as kids in the Sixties. Big. Loud. I mean seriously loud.

So interspersed with the "regular" fireworks every so often there'd be this ginormous flash and BOOM!! when one of these things would go off, rattling the windows and shaking the tree branches.

And...

2) Someone else had set his car alarm, including the fucking motion detector.

Which went off every time Person #1's bombs would explode.

Which meant that all evening we were serenaded with a fusillade of smaller pyro, a massive blast, and then the whooping of the fucking Car Alarm of Freedom.

"Boom-crackle-boom-pop-pop-crackle-boom-BOOM!!!whoopwhoopwhoop!"

It that doesn't say something about the State of This Goddamn Union right now, I can't think of a better.

 

Damn it. I miss my country.

Can you see..?

The morning of the 242nd Independence Day is cool and cloudy in Portland. The little house is quiet; everyone, including Nitty Kitty curled on the hard planks of the deck outside, is still asleep. I'm at the table in the front room with my coffee and my work laptop, listening to the muted sounds of the summer morning and wondering about my country.

Or, to a great extent, how much there is of "my country" that remains this day in the New Gilded Age.

Almost two years ago now I wrote about my anger and fear of the terrible course my country had embarked us all on.

"I am now too old to really hope or fear for my country. But I have hope, and fear, for my children's country. And if, having listened to the foolish ranting of this president-elect, having seen the parade of grifters, unhinged racist loons, incompetents, and Bush-era retreads he has threatened to employ, you are "happy" about that, Jim, then I'm afraid I will have to sadly lower my opinion of the pre-VOLAR SF officer selection process.

Had I lived in 1896 or 1916 I would hope that I would have been attacking the Pinkertons or the troops suppressing the striking workers. I hope I would have been writing flaming rants in the pages of the Socialist press, and excoriating the bosses and the corrupt politicians like Trump who suckle off them. I hope I would have been unhappy - hell, I hope I would have been furious! - that millions lived and died in poverty and misery so that a handful enjoyed luxury in the "land of the free".

And in 2016 I see that we have been handed over to those who would love to return to those Gilded Age days. I am unhappy and furious about that, and if it shows through the screen from this place, well...then I have done good work here."

Since that time I have seen everything I hated and feared about the unmitigated rule of the GOP come to pass. Just this past Saturday Nazis - actual Nazis! - fought street battles in my home city, not much different than the brawls the Spartakists and the Freikorps fought in the Weimar cities.

The fuck..? I have fucking freikorps in my home?

All of this leads back to the other evening when I went to a Portland Thorns match against the NWSL team from New Jersey. I got there a little late because I had work that ran long, and I was in the line for a beer when I heard the tannoy announce the entrance of the teams and the preparation for the Patriotic Ritual that We the People have - to my mind freakishly - decided with which to begin every meaningless sporting event.

And my weary thought was, well, fuck. I'm glad I don't have to stand for that and pretend to be a Hearty Patriot.

Because my nation sure doesn't feel much like the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave to me right now.

And, worse, because there seems to me to be nothing but disastrous choices open to fight the "conservative" scum whose ideal is a return to the ways and times of 1929, or 1899. I am too old and fragile - and too central to my family's security - to fight, actually fight, the Nazis in the street. My vote, coming as it does from distant blue Oregon, seems a frail reed, flattened in the storm of plutocratic, racist nativism my enemies are bringing to the battle. All I have is my words on this page, and those seem now like shouting into the empty air, unheeded and useless.

All this past month I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, her popular history of the pre-WW1 Western world. In it I'm reminded of why the New Dealers did the New Deal. The original Gilded Age and it's comet-tail that lasted until 1932 was an unspeakable horror for people like me, people without money and power, people who would have been forced to beg and scrape for a living knowing that once we were too old, or too damaged, or simply unlucky we were ensured a slow death from poverty and immiseration.

That's why the first Gilded Age was full of violent rage. Presidents, kings, ministers of state were murdered by "anarchists" who were, largely, simply men who were furious at the knowledge of that coming slow death and chose, instead, to visit quick and violent death on others they felt were responsible.

The lives and homes of most people like me were in the ever-present shadow of sickness from foul air and filthy water, from disease and injury for which they could not afford treatment. The great and the good would glide past them in effortless majesty, sleek, replete, shining and happy - at least, from afar - and healthy while all the then-me could have done was shake with impotent fury that they should be born to unearned happiness and I to relentless toil.

A friend of a Facebook friend had a snarky comment the other day about how people like me weren't "willing to give President Trump's policies time to work..." and my immediate response was "Because we don't have to give them time because we've already seen how they work, you fucking stupid Trump-humper!"

"Unlike you goddamn FOX-addicted morons we've read the histories of where the Trumpkins of the GOP want to take us. We already know what's gonna happen, how this shit ends, because We the People have done it before. Trade wars, nativism, racist immigrant-bashing, plutocracy, authoritarianism? Fucking "duh", you nitwit, where the hell else are we going when Orange Foolius and his GOP's "policies...work"?"

I feel this day much as many another generation of Americans must have felt in the 1850s, watching as a cabal of greedy, foolish, venal, ignorant, and, yes, evil neighbors drove their nation into bloody war.

And I wonder. Can this nation endure, half-FOX and half free? Or are we, this day headed where they were, where, in the words of the man who was perhaps most strongly charged with steering the nation through the ruinous result:

"All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

All I can say is; I do not know.

But the prospect makes me sick at heart, and leaves me with nothing by a mournful longing for the past, and the foolish innocence of my younger days, on this Independence Day.