Partial Readings: On the Fourth of July
Partial Readings: On the Fourth of July
Partial Readings: On the Fourth of July
A Patriotic Left
From Dissent?s archive: Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin describes his patriotism
I love my country. I love its passionate and endlessly inventive culture, its remarkably diverse landscape, its agonizing and wonderful history. I particularly cherish its civic ideals–social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy–and the unending struggle to put their laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice. I realize that patriotism, like any powerful ideology, is a “construction” with multiple uses, some of which I abhor. But I persist in drawing stimulation and pride from my American identity.
Twenty years earlier, the editors at the Nation asked some of their writers to offer accounts of their own patriotisms. You can read their answers here.
WWFFD?
Just in time for Independence Day, Michelle Malkin has trotted out the founding fathers to dispute Obama?s statement that America is a “country of immigrants.” Such a claim is a “warm and fuzzy non-sequitor,” and “assimilation saboteurs” such as Obama and other “pro-amnesty extremists” have mistakenly “put ‘one world’ over ‘one nation under God.’? “The Founding Fathers were emphatically insistent on protecting the country against indiscriminate mass immigration,” Malkin writes. According to Malkin, one of these brave men staving off the immigrant hordes was Alexander Hamilton, who was born…in the West Indies. Eight other members of the constitutional convention of 1787 were born outside the Thirteen Colonies.
The Metaphorical Candidate
In an ad for Alabama congressional hopeful Rick Barber, the candidate shouts to the Founding Fathers (one of whom sports a gun), “Some of you men own taverns. Sam, you are a brewer, Mr. President, a distiller. You know how tough it is to run a small business with the tyrannical government on your back. I can?t stand by while these evils are perpetrated. You gentleman revolted over a tea tax?a tea tax! Now look at us.” To which a military-clad Washington look-a-like replies, ?Gather your armies.? On Hardball with Chris Matthews, Barber claimed that his call to action was only a “metaphor” for a “political army.” ?Are you a metaphor for a guy running for office,” asked Matthews, “or are you a real candidate?”
O Say Can You See…
A nuclear explosion! NPR’s All Thing’s Considered reminds us that, just after July 4, 1962, the U.S. government detonated a hydrogen bomb 250 miles above the earth, creating an explosion grander than any fireworks display you were planning on watching this year. Said science historian James Flemming,
The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth’s atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb’s radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and ? most peculiar ? d) if a man-made explosion might ?alter? the natural shape of the belts.
Wrote the Honolulu Advertiser of the explosion that year: “N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling: Good View Likely.”
“Liberty is not a cruise ship”
Following Republican antics at the Kagan hearings, Dahlia Lithwick writes, “The GOP is a party in dire need of a new metaphor.” Senator John Cornyn, for example, declared that “liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man of war, and we are all the crew.” Lithwick writes,
Perhaps all of us can agree, however, that this sort of big melodramatic debate about ‘freedom’ is not the best way to confirm future justices…Republicans fear that, in this confirmation hearing, Kagan is pretending to be just what [Justice] Roberts pledged to be (temperate, centrist, and humble), but that once she takes the bench, she will become Marshall (legendary, visionary, liberal). And in a weird piece of symmetry, this Republican fear is the Democrats’ most fervent hope. And so all of us will become, at least for the next four days, a sort of cruise ship of pampered passengers, tacking back and forth between John Roberts on one shore and Thurgood Marshall on the other. And Kagan will turn the wheel, squint at the spray, and looking just mildly seasick, steer us right down the middle.
Photo: Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of George Washington (Gilbert Stewart / Wikimedia Commons)
