Fireworks


 


On July 4th, as I was driving through town, I felt a double bump that made me wonder whether I had run somebody over. Immediately after, though, i felt a shower clatter on the hood and roof. There had been little showers all day, but I saw that this shower was of flecks of gray ash.

I love this town.

Although Britain has an edge on us with Guy Fawkes Day, and fireworks go back to ancient China, the founding myth for Americans is the Star-Spangled Banner and the rockets and bombs. And you know, it really is wonderful that we celebrate Independence day by mocking the effectiveness of explosive weapons. (Of course, Britain on their day also lionize ineffective explosives.) What we celebrate with fireworks is the brilliant light and thunderous sound and tails of fire--all the wonderful stuff we could have if only we could separate the glory from the destruction.

Throughout this dark time, I've been denying the sentiment of what seem to be a legion of lefty blog commenters who were saying that America was over, that it was fun while it lasted but the constitution is in shreds and our government practices wars of aggression, torture, secret police tactics and loud blatant lying, all with the excuse that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. (Of course, if you look at the end of the Declaration of Independence, you'll notice that it's precisely that.)

But last week it struck me with a metanoiac shock that America had changed--that even if we through the neotenic sociopaths out, and set out with diligence to make this a just, exuberant, kind and beautiful nation again (as it is from microsecond to microsecond, and square foot to square foot)--We really are not the same nation we were seven years ago. Maybe not worse (whatever that means), but different --puberty different, nervous breakdown different, parenthood different, satori different, dark night of the soul different.

We've done it before, and Republicans seem to play a part in it. The era this most resembles is post Civil War, where we went from a trembling, wounded bleeding nation that had nonetheless ensured its survival and righted a cancerous wrong--to an arrogant, robber baron Indian killer industrial hell of a nation, with a ruling class dipping into the till and carving out various empires. The era climaxed (or scraped bottom) with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act , which set down as Federal law the second-class status of native born Americans, only twenty years after we fought a war to end that concept.

Under the Republicans, we had our old, only-semi-justified idealistic pride in our exalted national ideas replaced, by trauma and recovery, with something more like ordinary nationalism. We became a nation that could contemplate having its own empire--which we acquired in the Spanish-American War.
(I should say--especially because there's not much coverage of it in conventional history--that the war and the acquisition of the Philippines especially, was fought loudly and bitterly, as many who thought that the United States of America, true to our previous self-image, should be the champion of democratic revolution wherever it might be--and not a foreign occupying power that freedom fighters would rebel against. But they lost the debate, and we became what we despised, and twisted our idealistic souls in knots.)

Similarly, we emerged from the end of the Cold War a bit dazed, that the world just seemed to have molted overnight, that not only Communism but apartheid simply crinkled and fell off, without bloody civil war, as Mikhail Gorbachev threw the house keys into the crowd as he got into the roadster with Raisa, and DeKlerk brushed the dust of demons and ghosts off his suit coat and shook hands with Nelson Mandela and showed him where his new office was. And the sky was filled with fireworks, all glory and no destruction.

And we beheld the world of the 21st Century, a shimmering crystal globe with no nuclear war, no hatred between the powers that could end our race's life in an afternoon--an America without a deficit, bursting with transforming technology, with only allies intent on solving together environmental problems and ethnic hatred, and a strange bright joy crept around our edges.

We looked at that shimmering globe, which was the Rule of the World, and for a decade or so we held back, as the old, old American dream and American self-definition also crept back in, as we gingerly imagined a world without kings. All the people....

But of course you can't let a thing like that hang around in the open. In 2001, as we gazed dreamily at the globe, George Bush and his cohort shouldered past us and grabbed the globe with both hands.

He's still standing there, hands half melted into the globe, and the globe is cracked and shudders from time to time, and brightly colored bolts shoot out in every direction.

But these bolts kill people, and set fire to cities and forests and fields. And it's pretty obvious that George is not controlling the globe or the bolts. It's possible the globe has destroyed him--borne out by the chilling smile frozen on his lips.

When we finally get rid of him and his, the sad truth is that the shimmering globe will be destroyed too. The world will no longer be ours to reshape. Europe and Asia will not let us have it back. And with a spavined army, a teetering economy and a large number of countries by now quite comfortable with thumbing their noses at us, we've lost our claims to leadership. We can and will, I think, get back into the first rank, and maybe even become first among equals, but never the trailblazer. Because they have all seen us fuck the child.

George Herbert Walker Bush would not have grabbed the globe, because he knew what it was and what it could do. But W--a quintessential immune American, who hadn't traveled outside the states, let alone shot furtive figures in a jungle--Little George looked at all that power and could only see fireworks.

We are going to find ourselves cut out of the big table, I think: the European Union, after all, has a bigger GDP than we do, and China has just been buying and buying up our debt--and we've stumbled badly in our support for science and basic research. Even if we make all the right moves from here on in, we've lost ground, and lost trust.

And maybe that's good for the world: it's certainly arguable that a monopolar world with one big power was a dangerous thing in and of itself, even if it was us. And certainly a world where restrained peaceful rivalry between economic blocs like the EU, the US, and China/Russia might be more inherently stable. And maybe, having screwed up the World Championship big time, we might be able to focus less on being best and more on being good.

Dunno. Time will tell.

But I'm kind of looking forward to it: for as Gandalf the Grey discovered, that, rather than be known as a mighty wizard, it's much better to be known as an excellent purveyor of fireworks.

Posted: Thursday - July 05, 2007 at 12:13 AM        

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