O beautiful for patriot dream

What to the poster is the Fourth of July? Plenty!

OK, I know: In a week the country’s gone from 70% to 80% Nazi, at least, so many of you may wonder why you should bother to celebrate the Fourth of July.

It so happens I’ve written a lot about what Independence Day has meant to me, and about the rightwing soreheads who just don’t get it. In 2012, for example, I wrote about how their seething rage and stupidity at having to stick almost four years of Obama, which made them unable to even talk coherently about Independence Day (or anything else!), seeing everything through cracked glasses of resentment and racism (“GOOGLE CHOOSES COMMUNIST-ORIENTED ‘THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND’ JULY 4TH THEME” — Breitbart). Wrote about it in 2013, too, after Obama won again (“How can we celebrate the degradation of liberty?” — Judge Andrew Napolitano), and many another time.

Funny. But who’d want to be like them?

I don’t bring this up to chide you, by the way, if you’re too mad that the Republican Congress traded Medicaid for the Gestapo and the Supreme Court conservatives displayed even more boldly than before their corrupt malignancy to celebrate. Hell, I’m mad too! I already hated all these fuckers with the intensity of a thousand suns and having to even notice them turning up their bullshit to 11 to steal more just turns up the candlepower.

But the thing is: This is my country and yours. I won’t even add “as much as theirs” because that’s not true: It’s not their country. They’re literal traitors. They fucking tried to overthrow the government. It’s not their country any more than France was Petain’s. They have no feeling for this country beyond “how can we exploit its stupid inhabitants?” I suppose you’ve noticed that Republicans hardly even refer anymore to the things real Americans associate with their country — consent of the governed, the blessings of liberty, lifting the lamp beside the golden door, etc. No, they hate all the good things about America, and only love that it has a lot of money and power that they can steal.

To put it in a way that the irony-poisoned may appreciate: Why should I change? They’re the ones who suck.

So fuck those assholes. It’s the glorious Fourth and it’s ours. What’s an artifact — movie or song or historical incident or anything else — that is or will be on your mind today?

I’ve done this number many times, and won’t restate too much: Longtime readers know how I love Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln — I’ll repeat a bit of something I wrote about it once:

This is the romantic, Sandburgian Lincoln who regards his fellow countrymen with love but also with a very large grain of salt. He suspiciously bites a coin offered for his services, and foils a lynching by offering violence (“I can lick any man here!”) and then eloquence (“Don’t want t’ put that log down, boys? Ain’t it gettin’ kinda heavy?”). He stands among but not of them, deliberating loftily but folksily over a country fair bakeoff as he would in the time of Civil War… We know Ford was interested in legends, though (see truth, legend, Liberty Valance); we know, from The Informer (and maybe from The Whole Town's Talking and Judge Priest) what Ford thought about justice; and we know it was 1939. If there was ever a confluence that might encourage a filmmaker to say what he thought America was, that was it.

I did a little gloss on that years later. Lincoln is good medicine. Tubby talks about him sometimes, with his usual appalling lack of comprehension, and among the absolutely deranged it may be effective; but more than once I’ve been among people of all kinds watching Raymond Massey’s Lincoln or Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln, and seen them mesmerized by the words and the great example of his plain but majestic American spirit.

I love the old patriotic songs — like Judy Garland singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic — and the folk tales retold like Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. And I love all the romantically patriotic old movie stuff. There is one such passage in particular that really gets to me these days — and might to you if you’re of a similar turn of mind. It’s up top: James Gleason in Meet John Doe: “I’m a sucker for this country.” If you’re boiling mad today like he was, as millions of others have been and are, remember that, when needed, they’ve always done something about it, and will do again.

What’s yours, citizen?