Bang. Whizz. Whee. What a great Fourth of July that was. And what an awesome idea, to have a holiday celebrating the right of the people to rebel against warmongering, tax-squandering, barely-able-to-speak-English idiots called George.
One criticism: I think Fourth of July should be renamed Pronounce “Croissant” Properly Day, in honor of the French troops, guns, gold and ships that won the American Revolution. Because if it wasn’t for the French, Americans would be speaking English. (Hint: It’s “kwa-sont,” you dumbasses.)
I jest. This is a ferociously patriotic country. Everyone is patriotic. Even guys who out CIA operatives do so because they love America. Hence all the flags adorning every available pole, antenna and lapel—so reassuring to the tourist fearful he might have accidentally strayed into Canada or Mexico.
Excuse me. I think patriotism is ass. My patch of dirt is better than your patch of dirt. Really? How old are we? Six?
Okay, so maybe patriotism isn’t just dirt-worship. Maybe it’s the veneration of shared national ideals. Like not deliberately lying about the reasons for starting a war.
Coupla weeks ago I channel-hopped twixt Simon Schama’s Power of Art on public TV and an interview with Princes Harry and William on NBC. Schama was talking about “Guernica”—Pablo Picasso’s gut-wrenching cubist painting of the right-wing terror-bombing of an undefended town during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso was politicized by the conflict, which pitted socialists, liberals and anarchists against the forces of nationalism, selfishness, bigotry and religion. If Picasso was a patriot, it was a patriotism born of contempt for everything most modern flag-wavers hold dear.
Meanwhile NBC was treating us to a horrifying spectacle of quasi-feudal groveling as a free-born American interviewer simpered in front of a couple of inbred English parasites whose only claim to fame is that they’re directly descended from psychotic medieval cattle-thieves. Uh, didn’t we have a revolution about that?
I like being English almost as much as I love being American—which I am, despite not being born here, not being a citizen and being able to pronounce “croissant.” How could you not claim to a be a co-citizen to Charlie Parker, Aretha Franklin, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., The Ramones, Muhammad Ali, Jello Biafra, Thomas Paine, Mia Hamm, John Reed, Emma Goldman, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Sam Adams (the beer and the rabble-rouser) ... and I could go on for hours. In what way are these people foreign to me?
Schama concluded his program by pointing out that when Colin Powell addressed the U.N. about the (totally fabricated) reasons for attacking Iraq, a tapestry of Picasso’s “Guernica”—with its images of children slaughtered by high-tech bombers—was covered up, lest it prove “distracting.”
Happy birthday, revolutionary republicanism. Happy birthday us.