partly cloudy patriotism

Every year on the 4th of July, I look forward to NPR's reading of the Declaration of Independence. The prose is so wonderful and the tone is so righteously indignant. It's hard not to be stirred by it. But this year, it left me cold. I wrote a Facebook status about this feeling, which read: "the Tea Party has ruined the 4th of July. The thrill is gone. You can tread on me all you want." I made myself laugh with the "tread on me" reference. I always used to run around saying that on the 4th, mostly feeling amused to think about Great Britain as the enemy of the United States. In the 21st century, that seemed pretty funny. But not any more. My dad has a "Don't Tread on Me" flag on his desk now, which the Tea Party sent to him as a thank-you for his financial contribution.

Anyway, after I thought about it for a few minutes, I deleted my status because I didn't want to stir up a political fight. I don't see the good of political fights generally, but especially not on Facebook. And my point wasn't so much to pick a fight as to note how the Tea Party's leveraging of the symbols and events of early America has further complicated my already complicated relationship to American history.

And just when I was feeling good and sorry for myself, I remembered Frederick Douglass's famous speech, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," in which he points out the irony of a slave-holding country founded on the premise of liberty and justice for all. "I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul," he writes, "that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!" And then I remembered that the 4th of July has always been complicated. That American history has, ever since there was American history, been leveraged in the service of political ideologies (something underscored for me by reading parts of Timothy Parrish's From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction (2008), which is super interesting). What life amounts to is that someone is always getting trodden on.

And now, how to find a graceful way out of this post. I could do no better than Frederick Douglass: "Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain."

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.