Friday July 04, 2003

HAWKS & DOVES. I marked Independence Day by putting on Neil Young's "Hawks & Doves." This record comes from one of Young's peripatetic periods, in which he seemed to be doing whatever struck his weed-addled fancy at any given moment, but the gesture of respect toward the American idea is genuine and often touching. The title track is real nice, and here are some of the words:

In history, we painted pictures grim
The Devil knows we may feel that way again
The big wind blows, so the tall grass bends
But for you, don't push too hard, my friend

Got people here down on their knees and prayin'
Hawks and doves are circling in the rain
Got rock 'n' roll, got country music playin'
If you hate us, you just don't know what you're saying

It's mild out this 4th of July morning, but the sun is bright and climbing. Sunlight is the reason, by the way, that the writing on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both now scientifically maintained and heavily guarded at our National Archives, is so faint. For years they were shown under glass in a public place, outdoors, so that the light that fell on the land and the citizens also illuminated those words.

The ink proved less durable than the land and the citizens. What about the ideas? Well, across the web world now you may read that we are either deprived of liberty, or supersaturated with it, in ways that would shame the Founders. Some believe it is far too difficult to get a handgun in East New York, and some lament the growing decriminalization of recreational sex.

These people are of course nuts, but many of us, maybe even most of us, are at least a little nuts in the same ways. I heard a Klansman cry once, "We carved our place in this wilderness with a Bible and a gun!" I think he was right. We love our autonomy, and the idea that with the right machines (including the kind that kill) we can do, as the lovely and supremely American phrase puts it, whatever the fuck we want. And we also believe ourselves to be the keepers of the Word, which the American accent renders pretty harsh at times, and inspires us to string up varmints.

So I can see where the wingnuts of all descriptions are coming from. In a way (just in a way) it is a marvelous thing that we are all here, grabbing at the rudder of the Ship of State.

The Puritans who settled here surely never imagined our community would be so contentious (and free of stocks and dunking-stools); perhaps neither did the Patriots, who set out from their little homes to shake a tyrant off their backs, not to establish a Federal Trade Commission. Maybe the Founders saw a little more, but I doubt they saw us, though maybe Jefferson did when he said this:

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.

Jefferson's God and mine may not exactly resemble one another (though I'm a Deist too), but I can see something in this. To his thinking liberty was natural, but also sufficiently foreign to the hearts of men that they might abuse it in their ignorance. And so he and his buddies made a Constitution that defends liberty, not any group or church or philosophy, or even the particular, now quaint, way of life these orderly men enjoyed. All that was left up to us.

Look what we've made of it. Is it good? Well, there's good and bad in it, certainly. I think those guys over the hill are ruining this country, and they think the same of me. Yet our battles haven't wrecked the joint. If the Civil War didn't wreck it, how the hell could we? Though the parchment crumbles and the ink is all but gone, the prescriptions the Founders wrote seem still to serve us well.

This is what we celebrate today. The date commemorates the Declaration and the fireworks commemorate the battles of the Revolutionary War, but this day is for America, the place, the people, and the idea. There will be mayhem and madness, some drunk will punch and maybe plug someone; when I turn on the TV some idiot will be talking. But if we are mindful of the occasion we will be somewhat easy that even this will not shake the pillars of the Republic. Hawks and doves are circlin' in the rain.