Whistle Boom

This Sunday is the 4th of July, a day marked by whistling, exploding fireworks, barbecue, cold beer, and the occasional bloody stump in place of a hand or finger. Normally I would write about the 4th after it happened, but  I plan on taking Monday off. so I might as well say a word or two about this most American of holidays now.

Made in China

What I like about the 4th, other than the high potential for a thrilling Logan's Run style fireworks-related death, is that it's a comparatively modern holiday firstly in that it has no direct sacred component, and second because it does not correlate to any sort of solstice, harvest, flood or drought.  It's just a day picked entirely by accident - we might as well celebrate the twelfth of May or the 3rd of January.  Luckily, we happened to throw off the shackles of British colonialism at the peak of pig roast season. 

What I don't like about the 4th is, predictably, the jingoism - this is more something I dislike about the culture at large over the last 10 years, but it's particularly evident and onerous on the 4th of July.  Patriotic affectations around the 4th used to just be kitschy dumb things like ridiculous star-spangled novelty hats or, like, okay one year I went to this 4th of July party and they had these red white and blue slap bracelets.  Remember slap bracelets?  They looked like rigid bookmarks, then you'd slap one on your hand and it would curl up into a bracelet.  Those things ruled. 

That's so totally them!

I think this is only in my craw because of course I'm going to have to put up with it all in 2 days, and also because I got an eyeful of the Military Channel yesterday.  In addition to show after show (after show) about World War II, I saw this little "Happy Independence Day" commercial (there's a series of them, it turns out) where this old guy is explaining to his kid that America and the military is teh Winz!!11one and blah blah sacrifice yada yada.   At the end of the commercial, the kid called the guy "Grandpa."  

The problem being, of course, that by this point that's great-grandpa.  We haven't had a good hard win in something like 60 years now, but we're still cashing in that old coin of cultural currency - World War II.  We are seriously beginning to sound like the guy who's worked for 20 years down at the tool and die shop who still brags about  winning some big game in high school. 

American spirit

What we need to do is stop picking on all these small fry countries.  Fuck empire - it's a pain in the ass!  Every other major country has figured this out, so why haven't we?  Shit, if we're going to posture like we're this big bad take-no-shit superpower, why don't we pick a fight with a real country?  Let's fight the Russians - they're crazy! I mean, they'll come at your tank with a pocket knife and, by sheer force of awesome, they'll win.  Fuck Afghanistan and this whole scout the hidey-hole find-a-cave crap - we need rows of tanks slugging it out at close range and hordes of infantry mowing each other down.  THEN we'd actually be living up to this John Wayne bad-ass image we evidently have built up for ourselves.

Regardless, this 4th of July I am committed to tuning out people's maudlin nationalistic speeches and teary-eyed (and horrible) renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner and just focusing on having a good time. I think the founding fathers would want me to eat too many hot dogs and drink a fifth of scotch.  I sure hope they did, because that's what they're going to get, and they can LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!

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