"In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false."
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| rock and roll means fuck "In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false." |
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Saturday, July 05, 2003 ...hey, baby. it's the fourth of july..." -X some ruminations on my rather schizophrenic relationship with my country, on patriotism and where karl rove can get the fuck off... well, today is our nation's 227th birthday, an occassion that has inspired a great deal of seemingly contradictory emotions and ideas in the still spinning head and oft beaten heart of this particular and admittedly rather peculiar boy. i am consumed by both a great and earnestly sincere love of this nation and a fairly sickly contempt for not only those in the driver's seat, so to speak, but for what i perceive to be their overt and deliberate injury to this republic that i and countless others, here and around the globe, hold so dear. i should preface the rest of this dispatch by elaborating somewhat upon the aforementioned schizophrenic appreciation my nation, its history and my place in it. i have been re-reading sarah vowell lately. (an aside: if you haven't read her or heard her stories on "this american life", you damned well should. i am of the opinion that she is one of the most insightful, smart, compassionate and eloquent commentators on the contemporary idea of what this nation is, was and how we relate to it.) my loving/not so loving appreciation of my country is as insanely complex and as supremely nuanced as its history would seem to demand of anyone who devotes more than ten seconds or so of thought about it. (an effort that seems to be more and more rare in these times) sarah describes this insane dichotomy as follows: "it's a good country. it's a bad country. it's a good country. it's a bad country. but, of course, it's both. sometimes i feel like a battered wife. 'sure, sometimes he smacks me around a little, but, man, he sure can dance'." today we observe the anniversary of the publication of a document, that if taken at face value, is as close to perfect as any such statement in the entire history of human affairs in my opinion. it is an amazingly rational, compelling and fantastically beautiful read. it is the absolute apex of the 18th century enlightenment. the problem is that, at the time of its composition, a significant portion of what it had to say was a lie, a fantasy. this document states that "all men are created equal" yet was composed by a man that owned other men. these men would have to wait nearly a century before their legal status as property was abolished and another century after that before such an emancipation acquired any real legal relevance. one should also note that the declaration posits the equality of men. women were really of no consequence in the affairs of state at that time. still, this was the real 'shot heard 'round the world'. this was a collection of ideas so powerful, so reasoned and so undeniable to the enlightened minds of jefferson's contemporaries and to billions of like minded souls since, that it has been emulated countless times and in numerous contexts since its conception. all these contradictions are enough to drive a sensible, thoughtful person kinda freakin' nuts. this is a country that was founded by folks who owned other folks yet less than a century afterwards engaged in the bloodiest and most destructive war in their history to end the practice. we pride ourselves on being a nation of immigrants yet still bicker, often quite bitterly, about immigration. we are a nation of folks who pride themselves on 'rugged individualism' and were wise enough to craft the fourth ammendment 216 years ago and yet, the idea that what consenting adults do behind closed doors in the privacy of their own homes was finally recognized by the nation's highest court as valid and constitutional last week! we defeated the evil of bloodthirsty, globe hungry fascism in the middle of the last century only to prop up dimestore fascists around the globe in the name of "anti-communism". of course i would be remiss not to state that we then rebuilt those formerly fascist states in what is probably the either the most magnanimous or simply wise acts of a victorious state in the history of the world. i could go on. i shan't. "..it's a good country. it's a bad country..." it's undoubtedly nuts, but, for better or for worse, that's who we are. which brings me to what has been on my mind the most today. it's both a question and some answers, a lament of sorts and a celebration. i should acknowledge that the following screed was inspired in part by an essay by bill kaufman i read a few days ago. an excerpt: "There are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the world, and the rest of us. The former is a fictitious creation whose strange gods include "Sex and the City," accentless TV anchorpeople, Dick Cheney, Rosie O'Donnell, "Friends," and the Department of Homeland Security. It is real enough--cross it and you'll learn more than you want to know about weapons of mass destruction--but it has no heart, no soul, no connection to the thousand and one real Americas that produced Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint Dorothy Day and the Mighty Casey who has struck out. I am of the other America, the unseen America, the America undreamt of by the foreigners who hate my country without knowing a single thing about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards who made their places live. " you can and should read the rest here the whole bit about the ol' VFD and such may strike some as cliche' and hokey and it just may be. whatever floats your boat. however, as one from a small town, a small southern town, these images (i'm a filmmaker. i can't help it. i think in pictures.) ring quite true and real. george bush II is not my america. karl rove is not my america. (special message to karl: ...fuck you, you ass munching fascist.) these clowns are nothing more than criminals, gangsters, usurpers. my america is jefferson (with all his faults), marion anderson, samuel gompers, will rogers, abraham lincoln, dr. martin luther king, faulkner, steinbeck, john ford, jackie robinson, twain, kathleen hanna, willie, barbara jordan, louis armstrong, tom paine, tom sawyer, tom jones, sam and dave. it's muddy waters and woody allen, sacco and vanzetti.. ..sacco and vanzetti.. ..sacco and vanzetti. my america is monk, miles, arthur miller, walker percy, jackson pollock, jello biafra, jello and john prine. it's ammendments 1 and 4. it's mamet, it's the missouri, the mississippi and the ohio. it's bull run and bunker hill. it's boston and blountstown. it's the cubbies and cowtowns and hank sr. it's those four little girls in birmingham. my america is chomsky and chi-town, cesar chavez, johnny cash, yogi berra, peanut butter and jelly. it's woody freakin' guthrie. it's frederick douglass, john brown and jack white. it's bed-stuy and the upper east side. it's whitman, frost, ginsberg and auden. it's the fourth of july and the drag queens of stonewall, too. my america is 'venus in furs' and 'rhapsody in blue'. it's the place that nabakov, brodsky, and solzhenitsyn fled to. it's james brown. it's dylan thomas, dylan and poe. it's harriet tubman, susan b. anthony and harper lee. it's black elk. it's joey ramone. it's the 6 train and the chattanooga choo-choo. it's apalachicola. it's a place that enron will never buy nor sell, a place that tom delay will never find comfort. it's a place where folks is folks and they're just trying to do the best that they can for themselves and for their community. community. remember that idea? the idea that the whole freakin' endeavour was founded upon? the whole "... And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." thing? it's an idea with no owner and no arbiter and it's the reason that try as they may, the greedhead empire builders will never be able to completely co-opt or destroy it. you can fool some of the people some of the time.... today i declare my independence. i declare my independence from that other televised, contrived, market researched, focus grouped and thoroughly fictional america. i pledge allegiance to our founding documents and the precious and wise ideas contained therein, to my neighbors, to the seemingly antiquated notions of decency and fairness. i pledge allegiance to the idea that dissent is indeed a patriotic endeavor, to the bill of rights and its preservation in these perilous times. i swear solemn vigilance to speak truth to power whenever and wherever i find that power is less than honest or lacking in candor. my america is all of these things, these folks and these ideas. my america is not to be trifled with, it is not to be dismissed. the state of the union troubles me. it also invigorates me in a way that i don't know that i can properly explain. there is work to do. the thought of this work is what gets me the fuck out of bed every morning. i will not go silently. i will not defer. i will not look the other way and hope for the best. the midnight oil burns brightly and often in this home. i am not alone and those that would rely on a complacent and slumbering populace to perpetrate violence on this republic, on this nation and others had better damn well know this to be true. we got your number, motherfuckers and we know where you live. patriotism, to me at least, is synonymous with vigilance and resolve. in that respect, i consider myself to be as patriotic, if not more so, than those who would state something to the effect of, "my country, right or wrong.". i absolutely refuse to sit by and watch the country i love so much, my Constitution, perverted and subverted for the aims of the greedy, of the imperialists, of the fascists. those that would despoil this republic for callous profit or tarnish her virtues for quick cash would be wise to fear the pointy ends of both my pen and my pitchfork. i wish to close with the words of a true american hero, barbara jordan. i had the outrageous fortune to be one of mrs. jordan's students at one time at the LBJ school of public affairs at the university of texas. a higher honor i have not known. "Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, We, the people. It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed, on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that We, the people. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in We, the people. Today I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." hear, hear.... posted by downtown | 2:45 AM |
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Cost of the War in Iraq
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