Happy Holiday!

Remembering the "manly principles of independence" on the Fourth of July

I read two things before bed last night. The first was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, whose popularity in early 1776 was key in convincing colonists to make a full break from England, a position considered radical even after the first revolutionary battles the year before. Through an academic’s lens, Common Sense is an exposition on the evils of monarchy and an impassioned argument for independence. On a line-by-line level, it’s more a standup routine about how people end up saddled with governments. You could imagine young Eddie Izzard doing it as a set called Kings and Other Tossers.

Paine imagines a “small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth.” Things are fine until they relax and let themselves go a little. “This remissness,” he says, highlights “the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.” The one-liners flow. “Some convenient tree will afford them a State House,” Paine groans, then spins the construction of the inevitable bureaucracy. Meetings of the community are soon replaced by a “select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake,” but they develop their own interests. As a result, regular elections now need to be held to keep the new permanent class of politician-donkeys in check, so “their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent reflection of not making a rod for themselves.”

The lousy system is better only than the royal alternative. Kings are said to have a hereditary connection to ancient wisdom, but when the “dark cover of antiquity” is pulled back, the first in the line turns out to be the “the principal ruffian of some restless gang,” who “overawed the quiet and defenceless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.” The text shifts to the theme that most excites Paine: making fun of Europeans. He calls William the Conqueror a “French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives” who in “plain terms” is “a very paltry rascally original.” If there are any “so weak as to believe” that this personage represents the divine line, “let them promiscuously worship the Ass and the Lion.” Paine will not “disturb their devotion.”

Common Sense frames the basic American attitude. We’re scum, but at least we admit it; not scum in robes, like the English. “He who hunts the woods for prey, the naked and untutored Indian,” he writes, “is less Savage than the King of Britain.” Even worse than “ruffians” who hide their despotism in false pieties are the spineless nobles who aggrandize them. He rails against Sir John Dalrymple, who wrote a letter from Britain to the “inhabitants of America” scolding them not to withhold praise for the king, “by whose NOD ALONE” they were “permitted to do anything.” Paine’s disgust for such power-worshipping New York Times-style editorialists is hilarious. He describes Dalrymple as an “apostate from the order of manhood” who has “sunk himself beneath the rank of animals, and contemptibly crawls through the world like a worm.”

Though he warns leaders might stop bothering to avoid making a “rod for themselves,” and we might become the thing we hate, Paine’s 47-page insult bomb is written in the plain, furious language you’d recognize in Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks centuries later. I wish he’d titled it Letters From Assholes in a Forest, but otherwise Common Sense still feels relevant, heartening given the events of the last weeks, when some of us have started to wonder how much longer this thing will last.

On that note, the other thing I read was a meme:

Enjoy the fireworks, have a few tonight, and happy holiday, everyone.