Hey Baby

The Big 2-4-7

Happy 247th birthday to the United States of America. And I thought I was old.

May your fireworks burn brighter and longer than ever today, gheorghies. Just don't lose any digits today -- I mean like JPP, not Phil or Rikki. 

Spend time today in free revelry, and enjoy the excitement only a free man can feel, as Red once said.

Maybe think about what and why we celebrate.

And maybe just drink some beer and listen to some good old America music. Not American music, per se, since these guys went to high school and subsequently got their start in London (though 2/3 were indeed American), but America music. America. The band.

Especially a song about the open highway and driving around in the sunshine in a car that Z would love and Dave would hate. A song that coined the term Purple Rain. 

What the hell, let's take that Purple Rain thing a little further and offer up the Purple One himself... singing "America." It could only get more American if this live clip had been recorded on July... or been in the US. Oh well.

Happy Birthday, America. 

(The country.)

American Life

Good morning, America, how are you?

I am an American aquarium drinker. A demolition style hell American freak, yeah. In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.

There was a Buffalo Soldier in the heart of America. Said he couldn't go on the American way. In Europe and America, there's a growing feeling of hysteria.

Well, she was an American girl. American woman. Knockin' me out with those American thighs.

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. She need to get a piece of the American pie and take her bite out. All night, she wants a young American.

For the boy we have American life. American boys hate to lose. Don't wanna be an American idiot.

We're the kids in America. Two American kids growin' up in the heartland.

White America, I could be one of your kids. Take a jumbo across the water, like to see America. They're coming to America.

Oh, but ain't that America for you and me. America the beautiful.

Do you like American music? We like all kinds of music, but I like American music best.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Dipshittery...

I saw pictures of a tank* rolling across the Anacostia River Bridge this morning, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

(* technically, it was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, but at 27.6 tons carrying a 25mm chain gun, a TOW anti-tank missile and a 7.62mm machine gun for backup, it's got a pretty tanky affect)

Much has been written in recent days comparing the President's* Independence Day celebration to those of authoritarian regimes the world over. Aside from a reflexive shake of the head at our tinpot leader's predictable instinct for look-at-me showmanship, I didn't give it much thought.

Then I saw the tank, and I was both pissed and unnerved. (I understand that it's not a tank. Enough already.)

Pissed, because it's honestly and ironically un-American to flash our military might to celebrate the country. No less a figure than Dwight D. Eisenhower - the last military leader to serve as President - offered this counsel on the issue, "We, the United States, are seeking peace. We are the pre-eminent power on earth. For us to try to imitate what the Soviets are doing in Red Square would make us look weak.”

(NOTE: Turns out Ike's inauguration parade in 1953 featured tanks and rockets. Apparently his thinking evolved. He did, after all, famously and presciently warn of the creeping influence of the military-industrial complex. This is why I should probably do research before I post, rather than after. Doesn't change my overall opinion, though. In modern peacetime America, tanks on the streets are weird and chilling.)

And pissed because displays of militarism on the 4th of July run counter to what I know of the American Armed Forces. I spent my entire childhood around military men and women. They are professional, and diligent, and honorable, nearly to a one. They're also exceedingly humble, in my experience. I can tell you with certainty that my father, no shrinking violet of a bleeding-heart liberal, would be highly annoyed with the festivities planned in the Nation's Capital tomorrow. He, like so many of his fellow soldiers, served not for acclaim, but out of a sense of duty. In essence, the diametric opposite of the current Commander-in-Chief.

I was unnerved because the scene was so jarring, so contextually...wrong. Tanks roll into places marked by strife, by instability, where ruling parties seek to quash dissent, or occupying armies show force to keep the defeated in fear and awe. They don't patrol the streets of high-functioning modern democracies. I don't mean to be alarmist, for sure, and I know the Bradley in question wasn't 'patrolling' anything in a real way, but the visual struck me cold nonetheless.

People purporting to be patriots will cheer American might tomorrow as planes fly over D.C., fireworks explode in the sky, armored vehicles pass by on Constitution Avenue. Those 'patriots' are cowards in my book. They're losing the war of ideas, so they wrap themselves in the might of the American military while they suppress votes, cage brown people in a form of fear cloaked in other-hating bravado, and celebrate a President* anathema to nearly everything I thought I knew of America.

I'll return to Eisenhower to close this melancholy message. In a radio chat in 1959, the general-turned-statesman said, “If my message to you on this Fourth of July could be put into one sentence, it would be this: State the facts of freedom and trust in God, as we have ever done.”

We're denying the facts of freedom, and trusting in our worst instincts. I don't expect to have a terribly happy 4th of July this year.