Independence Day
I love the Fourth of July. I always have. As an American, I can’t help but love seeing our country’s flag flown everywhere and the patriotic grandeur of it all. I even have a favorite way to celebrate Independence Day too. I head to a usually sleepy beach town, take in a very sad parade and then kick back and watch society crumble around me.
Surely you are rolling your eyes at my choice of words. Well allow me to support my case as gently as possible (for me).
The Fourth of July, provides a booster shot of confidence to an already over-confident people. Think about it, we’re still celebrating a victory we had over the British that happened over 235 years ago. I mean, talk about spiking the ball… 235 years and Great Britain still returns our phone calls. That country is full of polite, good sports. Every year, at the beginning of July, Great Britain can expect to get drunk dialed by the braggarts in the United States and the conversation goes something like this:
Great Britain: Good Day, thank you for calling Great Britain, how can we help you?
US: Good Day? (yells to buddies off the phone: He said, “good day” instead of “hello”, can you believe???) Hell Yes it’s a good day! Can you guess why?
Great Britain: Oh, hello United States, *sigh*, we can only guess that Pontiac has started making the Trans Am again? Is that the case?
US: No, you pompous limey Brit! Tell me what day it is?
Great Britain: … *sigh* It is the Fifth of July.
US: No it’s not you stupid Englishman. It’s the FOURTH of July! What’s the matter? Does your country make calendars as good as it wins wars?
Great Britain: Dear Lord, is it THAT time of year again? Very well, get on with your gloating about your winning a war fought between us over two and a third centuries ago, over a tax so small, it wouldn’t pay for the paper Her Majesty’s law was written on. Incidentally, the reason you are confused about the date being the FIFTH of July is that our countries are in different time zones. In your time, it is still the fourth of July, while in Great Britain, we have progressed passed midnight into the Fifth of July.
US: Shut up Not-So-Great-Britain! You don’t have some stupid time machine that makes your day different from the rest of us. Maybe that’s what got you in so much trouble a couple hundred years ago, you thinking you can just lie your way out of stuff.
Great Britain: I suspect what got GREAT BRITAIN into trouble was that we didn’t send enough books and teachers over to the colonies, to explain how things like government, taxes and TIME ZONES worked. You see, when the Earth moves around the sun, it rotates slowly, and shines on only part of the planet at a time, this creates…
US: “Earth rotates around the sun?” Whatever. That’s crazy talk, and why would we want books when everything’s on TV?
Great Britain: Well it was VERY nice speaking with you again, United States. I’m sure this phone call is VERY expensive and you would like to get back to your fireworks…
US: Too expensive? We’re the richest country on Earth! Hey GB, answer me this, why aren’t you speaking German now?
Great Britain: Ahh yes, are we on to this now? Is it time for you to remind us of, how did you elegantly put it last year, “you saved our bacon from the krauts in World War 2?”
US: You bet your butt we did. And not just WWII, but that other war too.
Great Britain: World War One?
US: Yeah, that one! You’re lucky we weren’t still cheesed off about that Revolutionary war business.
Great Britain: Or the War of 1812 for that matter.
US: You really don’t know nothing do you? The American Civil War was over in 1776. It’s on a bunch of our quarters so nobody will forget.
Great Britain: Well, I hear my tea kettle, I really must be going. I simply cannot wait for this conversation next year. Do you have a service that can ensure you get home? You sound like you have been indulging in the spirits.
US: The spirits? I’m not at church, you pompous moron, I’m at a party! The ”service” I use to get home is my pickup and my wits.
Great Britain: Very well, please be careful and sleep it off before operating your motor vehicle.
US: Shut yer trap, you stuck up…(Click)
I imagine that’s how my British friends see this American holiday. We see patriotism and freedom and the rest of the world sees a bunch of us overweight Americans standing around outside in t-shirts and flip-flops betting on how many hotdogs a person can put away in a certain amount of time. I love hotdogs and contests as much as the average person, in fact when it comes to hotdogs I’m far ahead of the curve. However, the fact that Americans go so overboard on the “confidence” part of Independence day is as off putting as it would be to anyone who encounters such a braggart.
If individuals were to approach a person they had not met with the same blind self-assuredness at a party, those individuals would be avoided like the plague. If I were in high school and tried to ask a girl to a dance with the kind of confidence that America has on the Fourth of July, that girl would be so turned off that she would immediately go to the powder room and write a warning to other girls on the mirror with lipstick: “Watch out for Steve Damm! He has delusions and bad breath!” I didn’t see that until halfway into my fourth year of college.
I love the patriotism in the United States, especially on Independence Day, but could we also use it as a time to reflect on what we could do better as individuals to MAKE our country even better? I’m not talking about winning hotdog contests either, which yes, we have mastered. Maybe if we use Independence Day to evaluate how we work together and live as neighbors would be a good thing. If we took the time to look at how we are ranked in the world of health, education and poverty, maybe the boasting wouldn’t seem so empty.
Currently the United States is “Number 1”, the most bestest ever at thinking we are “Number 1.” At least that’s what a current study of teenage boys says. Now, that same group of teenage boys is 25th in the world when it comes to math skills, but if you ask them, they’ll say they are the best, proving they don’t understand the values of numbers, which in turn proves that they are indeed 25th at math. THAT is overconfidence. So I’m proposing, maybe we use Independence Day to make America a better place and work together to raise all the important numbers back to “Number 1.” If for anything, the country needs to come together to save those teenage boys from being proven wrong and embarrassed in front of people they would like to make out with.
I also enjoy travelling to a sleepy beach town on the Oregon Coast specifically for the holiday. Oregon Beach towns are very big on parades. Very big on parades, and the one I prefer is one of the saddest of them all. When I was younger, and the economy was a little better maybe, the parade was very much like you would picture a parade to be. Lots of fun floats and marching bands and community members would make their way down the route, waving and playing music. It has deteriorated somewhat in the last few years.
There is now only one marching band and it is the Scottish drum and pipe kind. Years have been especially unkind to this group. Either Alcoholism or the vanishing art of the style of playing has dwindled the numbers down from row upon row of kilted tooty-bag-squeezers to just seven members walking to the beat of a lone snare, bass and tom-tom. (Come to think of it, maybe being referred to as a kilted tooty-bag-squeezer didn’t exactly entice a younger generation to pick up the pipes. I’m sorry, ancient Scottish art form.)
The floats with waving princesses have been replaced by pickup trucks pulling trailers with boom-boxes blaring barely audible Lee Greenwood songs. I miss the floats, and by miss the floats I mean, I miss where I had to try to figure out the mechanism to transport that much paper Mache. Now we just have pretty cars with banners and signs. In fact in the last couple of years it has been hard to determine when the parade was actually over and traffic started rolling by slowly.
They still throw candy to the children, and the children really get excited about it. They run right out into traffic to get it. My son’s hand was almost crushed this year but a Dodge pickup full of 4-H’ers all for the sweet sweet taste of a broken Watermelon flavored Joll-E Rancher. Luckily my redneck holler kicked in and I was able to address past the candy receptors into the pain and fear receptors of my son’s brain with a sharp bark of his name. My wife looked at me as if I had the dignity of a man who thought a fish fork was for gigging frogs. I looked back with a confidence that communicated I just ensured the two years of piano our son had completed would continue to be possible.
This particular parade ended and has ended with a fire truck slowly making its way through town and firing its water cannon at the people. Many flee, and just as many jump out into the street to get hit by the high pressure hose. As the people in the street scream with delight (?) as they are hosed down (my son loved it), I can’t help but think back to America’s recent history, when a fire hose was used for a much more sinister purpose in the 60’s. I’m speaking of course of the scene in the film, Planet of the Apes when a gorilla used a fire hose to separate the astronaut Taylor, played by Charlton Heston from the “female” Luna, played by an actress as they were held in a cage. That fire hose represents all that will go wrong with Humans and Apes in the future.
Let’s talk frankly about fireworks shall we? I can’t possibly be the only one in the country that gets a twitch in the logic center of my brain when any moron with two dollars can purchase enough explosives to blow up… anything.
In a country that is so paranoid about terrorism, a country that gave up their freedoms of private phone calls and unopened mail, of home surveillance and the ability to transport breast milk and toe nail clippers on an airplane, we have no problem opening up booth after booth of super cheap gunpowder to ABSOLUTELY ANYONE. Open the fireworks and dump them into a pipe and you have a bomb. Just a year or two ago, a rookie terrorist put some gasoline and fireworks into car and tried to blow up their car at Times Square, so it totally happens. Why didn’t it work? The fireworks malfunctioned, which brings me to the next part of my meandering piece: Fireworks are unpredictable.
All fireworks are simply different sized pieces of dynamite with strategic holes cut in the tubes for propulsion and patterns for the fire to follow. Plug those holes and you have dynamite. Every year I cringe as I watch a parent direct a child to hold a Roman Candle while it shoots white-hot balls of colorful flame into the air. Apart from the obvious hazard of the child wondering if and when the next ball is coming and trying to look down the tube, what would that parent do if the candle’s tube was obstructed and there was no escape for the gunpowder? The answer is watch in horror as the kid’s arm was blown off. It happens. It happens often.
These fireworks, which I will completely come clean and admit to shooting off my share, are created in Chinese factories by less than rested, non-union employees. If every single unit that is produced, isn’t produced exactly right, you just have varying sizes of dynamite waiting to go off. But, you know, the youth group has a trip to the city coming up so why not sell explosives to get there? It might be safer, community wise, to just have that same youth group sell .38 specials out of the trunk of a car. They would make more money and society would be safer too (short term).
This is just the “safe and sane” types of fireworks, the kind that “report” instead of explode. There’s no real difference when it comes to explosions and “reports” other than the fact that one of the words ISN’T “explosions”. Personally, I know the difference and it is vast. An explosion is a sudden release of energy, while a report is a document with data and graphs that I give to my boss two days after it is due. The “safe and sane” fireworks are neither however, they have escaped the scrutiny of whatever safety inspector deemed unsafe. As if one type of fire can burn you or your house down and another is the kind that lights fairy houses or makes bushes speak. This separates fireworks into two classes: legal, and “I’m sorry sir, you’ll have to get that from either an arms dealer or a Native American Reservation.”
Oddly enough, I have very few problems with Native Americans selling big illegal fireworks to non-Native people. Native Americans got (and get) such a raw deal from the United States, I think it is completely justified for them to be able to sell any instrument of destruction they can back to the people that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Native Americans. Have you seen the types of conversations that go on at these illegal stands?
Redneck: See son? Now THESE here are REAL fireworks. The kind of fireworks I grew up with as a kid. Firecrackers, cherry bombs, rockets and more, I’m going to show you a special 4th of JU-LY! Hey Tonto, come on over here and sell me some good stuff.
Native American: That’s not my name.
Redneck: Sorry Geronimo, I didn’t know your name.
Native American: Talks To.
Redneck: What? Talks to who?
Native American: That’s my name: Talks To. You can call me Talks To. It’s short for Talks To Stupid People. It’s an old family Indian name.
Redneck: Alright Talks To. Let’s get a big box of stuff. I want some really big firecrackers.
Native American: We have M100s.
Redneck: Are they the biggest you got? What kind of damage will they do?
Native American: Well, they’ll blow a fence post out of the ground or your hand off your body.
Redneck: EXCELLENT, I’ll take 10!
Native American: Great, I hope you have 5 friends?
Redneck: Uh, yeah, I do, why?
Native American: Well… if you promise you’ll tell your friends where you got these, I’ll give you a discount.
Redneck: Done and done Kemosabe! Now do you have any rockets? I want some big rockets.
Native American: We sure do. And if you buy one of the big ones, I’ll throw in one of our small “indoor” rockets.
Redneck: Indoor Rockets?
Native American: Sure, brand new technology this year. We’re giving them away because this batch came without the safety labels. Can’t sell them, so we’re giving them as bonuses with the purchase of the bigger rockets. They don’t work as well outdoors and they make big colors inside, particularly in rooms where you can draw your curtains closed.
Redneck: Alright, then give me two, one for me and one for my brother, he couldn’t come.
Native American: Is your brother’s house big enough? They work better in bigger houses, or apartment buildings.
Redneck: HUGE house. He’s going to love it.
Native American: Just be careful. Don’t mix up the big ones and the little ones. The big ones should be done outside only. The little ones are for inside. Can I interest you in any of our Duty Free alcohol across the street? Go ask for my cousin, Asks No Questions. He will get you all you can handle.
At least I hope that’s how it goes. One of my redneck neighbors burned the house down next door to them. It was empty because the people that lived there couldn’t stand to be around their neighbor as he blew up half his yard.
Putting aside the fact that we open up conveniently located cheap explosives arsenals on every corner of our community, what of the injuries and fires that happen so casually with these incendiary devices? Are we this blind to tradition that we casually ramble through several days of unnecessary danger?
Then of course, American society adds alcohol to the equation of gunpowder plus over-confidence. Alcohol, which is sometimes flammable on its own, has the accelerated effect of making bad decisions exponentially worse. It also makes people just creative enough to make a bad decision worse. This is when you start to see improvised fireworks, or altered fireworks. People cut open and pour out gunpowder or duct tape items up, or submerge them (which again, I have done and thought was incredibly cool). They’ll put them in cans to see what would happen. Sometimes it’s really interesting or cool, and sometimes it’s just shrapnel. I’m extremely thankful that none of my experiments went wrong because I am pretty stupid.
Fireworks and alcohol go together like… Well, like fireworks and alcohol. Unfortunately I cannot think of a dumber combination than those two things to provide you with an amusing simile.
I capped off the night sitting on a once perilous beach, watching a fantastic display of fire and color in the sky. I say once perilous, because the beach used to have an absolutely insane amount of personal fireworks going off. Explosions, fire, 3000 degree sparklers in the hands of 3-year-olds, it was a beach without reason. Now it has been declared illegal to shoot off any and all fireworks on that beach so that cut the pyromania by almost half. Seriously.
The big firework show is put on every year and looks absolutely spectacular. It is paid for by the donations of the tourists and residents of the city all year long. Each year the show gets bigger and bigger. I believe the 45 minute show costs around $100,000. It’s probably more and it is absolutely grand when the coast isn’t fogged in (it was clear as a bell). I couldn’t possibly think of a better way to spend that kind of money in a poverty stricken town, could you?
It certainly went better than San Francisco’s planned fireworks display for this year. Instead of launching them one after the other for 45 minutes, the million dollar display all went off at once… before dark. If you set $1 million in cash on fire (which they kind of did), it would burn longer than that firework display lasted.
Please do not take this ramble as me being decidedly unpatriotic or cynical. I really love Independence Day and I think with just a few easy tweaks, we could use it to move us in a constructive direction or help us become the country we say we are. I’m proud of what America can be. I’m excited for this next year as an American and look forward to a year of making my country a better place for everyone to live, and that’s the Damm Truth.