In Spite of Everything, Celebrate this Fourth of July

On ignoring the noise and celebrating what matters

Canadian author Stephen Marche, in The Guardian, writes “This Fourth of July, the world declares its independence from America”:

As the United States retreats from the world, it is reshaping the lives of its former trading partners and allies, leaving huge holes in its wake… The Canadian strategy, undertaken with vigor by the newly elected government of Mark Carney, has been clear in spirit at least: a polite “go fuck yourself.” After you’ve told America to fuck off, though, the real work starts. You have to figure out how to live without them.

This Fourth of July, the consensus around the world and in our still-humming (despite distress calls about a fascist takeover) mainstream press, is that 2025 America is lost, a reject, the pig of the world. We’re delinquents, no longer fit to sit at the grownup table, much less lead. Pundits like Mr. Marche (is there anything in the world less believable than a Canadian saying “Go fuck yourself”?) imagine they’re insulting us by saying we no longer deserve titles like “responsible” or “dignified,” forgetting who Americans are and always have been: screwups, losers, earth’s trash. Mutants, as Bill Murray put it in Stripes, whose “forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.”

Independence Day is when we embrace being sneered at and dismissed as lowlifes by the civilized world. At least, that’s what I’m choosing to do today:

There are reasons for mixed feelings. On one hand, the images of ICE agents tossing people out of the country sting and contrast with my idea of what this country is about. Even knowing that a lot of what we’re looking at is media manipulation (on both sides, incidentally) doesn’t make it feel right. These raids have always gone on and as even the New York Times points out today, Donald Trump has a long way to go before he catches up with the number of “repatriations” in George W. Bush’s second term, or Barack Obama’s, for that matter. Still, the image of the America that took in everyone’s tired, their poor, their huddled masses is gone for now, and that’s something to be mourned, no matter what your politics.

On the other hand, we’re now about a decade into a relentless campaign by consensus-makers in academia, media, and politics to rewrite history in a way that describes even aspirational America as flawed, racist, and vicious. There’s something bizarre and suspicious about this campaign. The New York Times today, for instance, ran a Frankensteinian editorial by Yale professor Greg Grandin that stitched George Washington to Trump, then negatively compared both with South American revolutionaries:

George Washington was among the first to appropriate America exclusively for the United States: “The name of American,” he told U.S. citizens in his 1796 Farewell Address, “belongs to you.” In contrast, the revolutionaries who sought to throw off Spanish rule did not claim the name America as their own.

For them, America symbolized not nationalism but internationalism. The Colombian political leader Francisco de Paula Santander wrote in 1818 that it mattered little where, exactly, he was born, for he “is nothing less than an American, and my country is any corner of America that isn’t ruled by the Spanish.” Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan revolutionary who liberated much of South America from Spanish rule, hoped that a free America — all of it — would lead humanity into a future ruled by law and justice.

Grandin went on to decry “a bellicose nationalism, the kind today represented by MAGA,” as being responsible for slavery, Indian removal, and “westward expanasion.” That “America” he contrasted with the later concept of Latin America, which was more “humanist, spiritual and attuned to the social interdependence of human existence than their grubbing, individualistic, egotistic, conquering, enslaving ‘Saxon’ neighbors to the north.”

I read this in shock. Are we supposed to be embarrassed to be Americans instead of Colombians or Venezuelans? Was “Go west, young man” canceled while I was on a flight this week? Is a United States that codified religious freedom really not “spiritual”? And is a professor from Yale really arguing on Independence Day that America’s problem is that it’s insufficiently tuned in to the “interdependence of human existence”? The Fourth of July has its silly side and obviously is no sacred cow, but how pathological does a person have to be to chide America for its lack of collectivist spirit on a holiday celebrating individual liberty?

Not long ago, the basics of American citizenship were uncontroversial and the challenge for all of us was living up to the ideal. As Martin Luther King put it, “All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper.” Now it’s as if our historians look back and see massacres and misery, but no Edison, Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Muhammad Ali. I don’t love the parody version of patriotism touted by Trump, but it shines through in the writings of people like Professor Grandin that they’re not proud to be Americans at all. Who can sign up for that? Why are we continually asked to choose between too much pride, and none?

We should be encouraged on this of all days to remember the good things about this country that have nothing to do with politics, from baseball to airplanes to most of the Rocky movies to just-departed George Foreman, Roberta Flack, Val Kilmer, and Brian Wilson. That’s who we are, not this dumb argument. To hell with the sourpusses. Happy Birthday, America.