Musings on the 4th of July

For someone without much nationalist spirit, I do love me a good display of fireworks. I also love smores, bonfires, eating lots of pie, canoeing, and being with my awesome family, all of which I did this weekend with my Albany-area relatives (if any of you are reading this--I MISS YOU ALREADY.)

As I say, my nationalist spirit is pretty much nonexistent, which started when I was 8 years old and was obsessed with the Daughters of the American Revolution after learning about the Revolutionary War from my 3rd grade teacher. Being a member of the DAR was my life goal. My mother had to inform me that due to my great-grandparents being immigrants (or my great-great-great-grandparents being untraceable), I wouldn't be able to join the DAR. This seemed ridiculous to my 8 year old self, and my nativism (such as it was) stopped right there. Still, I admit to having a big crush on John Adams. That Ben Franklin was a good egg, too.

Anyway, I am back in Brooklyn with quite the sunburn, and it is 103 degrees so I am holed up in the library reveling in the air conditioning, of which our apartment has none. Here are some of my favorite Independence Day-related tales:

1. Last year I went to the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest, and blogged about it in one of my first posts! It was a truly ridiculous, remarkable, and revolting undertaking, and I'm mostly bummed that I missed it this year because Kobayashi got arrested! I can't imagine what Coney Island looked like while that went down. This year I spent most of the 4th on a canoe, in the creek on an inner-tube, eating gratuitous amounts of meat (seriously, the most meat I've eaten in 6 months--this is what being a pseudo-vegetarian does to you), and then going to watch the fireworks.

2. When I was in 3rd grade and learning about the Revolutionary War (are you sensing a trend?), we each got a nice piece of paper and were told to write "Taxation without Representation is Tyranny" in cursive, which we had just learned how to do. Well, I misspelled one of the words, although I can't remember which one now--I have a feeling it was "tyranny". Anyway, I was gutted because the paper wasn't white so it's not like I could white it out without it being super-obvious, and since it was nice paper we only got ONE each. I had to white it out and it looked dumb. It's weird that I remember this so vividly, but I've never forgotten the phrase "Taxation without Representation is Tyranny."

3. My grandmother went to go see "Independence Day" when it came out, on Independence Day, because she thought it was going to be a patriotic movie. She got there late and it was dark so she got a seat in the middle of the row and then the movie came on and was all gory and alien-y and she stayed, for the whole thing, because she didn't want to stand up to leave and block someones view. To this day, she describes this is as a "horrifying experience".

4. The library in my hometown has a drillteam, ie librarians with book carts doing formations, often to music or to the shouted encouragement of Earl, who drives the bookmobile behind them in the Mayville 4th of July Parade. It's quite the sight. If you want a taster of the awesomeness, check out these pictures. It's a high point of the parade. I was going to be handing out bookmarks with them one year when I was working there, but then it rained so they didn't go because they didn't want the book carts to get rusty--which was probably just as well, since the only red shirts I had to wear were one which said "the vaginas are coming" and another which featured the kids from The Boondocks.

5.

This is a work called White Flag by Jasper Johns (1955). I admit to never being that into Jasper Johns, but it's a different story when you see his works in person, which I've had the luxury to do this past year. White Flag is made with encaustic (heated wax and pigments, which is super temperamental and dries really quickly), oil, newsprint and charcoal, which basically means that this work, like many of his others, is richly textured while still being monochromatic. I don't know why I like this one, but something about the tactility of the media and the layering of the newsprint makes me think about America in all its contradictions. We are a country which whitewashes--we pretend we have overcome racism, homophobia, what we have done in other countries in the names of war and peace and safety, severe class inequalities, the way immigrants are treated--when in fact we've just covered up these injustices with slick marketing campaigns. Yes, other countries have these problems. Yes, we're not the worst. But we're not the best, either.

John Adams was the lawyer for the English after the Boston Massacre, because he believed that everyone should have a fair trial and a fair defense. He also said, "The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."(letter to Abigail Adams, 1780.)

Thanks, John.