How to Celebrate America
The Revolution that Has Yet to Happen
America loves to celebrate itself. And we love to celebrate in ways big and loud — favoring the recreation of the sounds of our country’s birth over the ideas, the promises, the writing down of powerful words. We don’t turn on the TV or unfold a chair in the park on July 4th to watch men in powdered wigs argue over some foxed paper.
The only thing America loves more than big and loud things is myth, particularly the myth of America itself. Just as we’re sure to be treated to local news stories of dads nudging hot dogs on grills while kids run through sprinklers that shoot water in gentle fans, we will have media segments on Americans’ thoughts about the country’s founding and its fathers, just regular folks talking about their favorite passages from the Declaration of Independence or whatever. Myths are, of course, just explanations by way of stories — in America’s case, how a group of brilliant and courageous men came together to pull a new country, the best in history, from the Heavens into existence. America is an ideal, and ideals are eternal, pure, even inevitable.
America’s myth has always contained a lot of slack. So many people weren’t in the room for the founding — women, slaves, the infirm, the poor, those who didn’t own land, those who owned the land before the carracks and galleons hit shore. As a result, the story of America usually told the loudest often leaves those people out, and, at its cruelest points, reminds them again and again why they don’t count. But at times more voices have become woven into America’s story, more lives and loves acknowledged, more kinds of happiness considered worthy of pursuit. My own family would not have its shape without these new voices; I’m married to an immigrant whom I wouldn’t be able to marry not that long ago, my father was handicapped, my mother and father both coming from poor rural families who somehow made it by.
We now find ourselves at a point of severe contraction, what feels like the worst in my lifetime. A very few are actively at work paring back the story of America to the powdered wigs and the myth of great (white) men with plots of land, a selective history and tradition. You know, back before racism or gay people or or ambitious women or even people for whom the world has been mean, all things created by liberals. These old ideas are wildly unpopular, which is why the Supreme Court has been captured so that the shift toward the powerful is more durable and out of democracy’s reach, even if that means asserting that the Constitution demands a lawless president even when the document itself and the whole history of the founding says otherwise, then disappearing into summer vacation.
I’m not sure what to tell my kids as they ready themselves to vote in their first presidential election this fall. I like to think that they have most of their lives and joy ahead of them, but American government’s lurch rightward in the past several years seems destined to make their pursuits of happiness less plausible and more dangerous — more oil and gas and more violent weather, more poisons in the air and water, more viruses and and virulence, more and higher rents extracted at every turn, more control of bodies surrendered, more bodies forgotten and cast aside, more wealth in fewer hands determining the range of permissible lives.
What to do? I don’t know, but here’s where I start. Instead of the Declaration of Independence this Independence Day, I urge you to pick up Thoreau’s Walden and turn to the chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” where he describes his experiment of moving to Walden pond and constructing a house:
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the 4th of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chunks, which made it cool at night.
The phrase that stands out is “by accident.” July 4th has no special status, no necessity or inevitability or purity, just coincidence, a shabby random start.
According to the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell, the story of the American Revolution calls Thoreau to the woods to begin again, to reenact the accidental origin of the country:
For an American poet, placed in that historical locale, the American Revolution is more apt to constitute the absorbing epic event. Only it has two drawbacks: first, it is overshadowed by the epic event of America itself; second, America’s revolution never happened. The colonists fought a war against England all right, and they won it. But it was not a war of independence that was won, because we are not free; nor was even secession the outcome, because we have not departed from the conditions England lives under, either in our literature or in our political and economic lives. (Senses of Walden, p. 7)
Our July 4ths are dedicated to the American Revolution. How do we see our freedom now? How far have we come from what we fought to leave?
Cavell writes,
“Any American writer, any American, is apt to respond … to the knowledge that America exists only in its discovery and its discovery was always an accident; and to the obsession As the rockets go up and bloom and the sparklers dazzle tonight, we should ask: Has America’s true revolution happened? What would America look like — who would America be for — if it did? And at this moment will this opportunity be, finally, lost forever?with freedom, and with building new structures and forming new human beings with new minds to inhabit them; and to the presentiment that this unparalleled opportunity has been lost forever.” (p. 9)
As the rockets go up tonight, we should ask: Has America’s revolution happened? What would America look like — who would America be for — if it did? Will this opportunity be, finally, lost forever?