It?s Fourth of July again and time to celebrate the founding of our nation with the fine American traditions of overeating, getting drunk and blowing the limbs off small children with cheap fireworks from China.
Hey, I know this is going to brand me as a freedom-hating, terrorist-coddling wimp who will never be invited to Karl Rove?s for a cookout, but I feel somebody has to pose the question: Must we honor America?s birth by, frankly, being downright gross?
Think back to the original Independence Day, when a group of brave and thoughtful individuals presented an eloquent document detailing their justification for crawling out from under England?s royalist boot heel and founding the world?s first successful democracy.
Flash forward more than 200 years and you have Americans extolling liberty by getting, as my grandmommy used to say, likkered up, revving up their gas-guzzling SUVs and dying on the highway in greater numbers than any other day of the year.
You have guys who rant and rave about flag burning amendments tying Old Glory on the antennae of pickups to be ripped to shreds, or displaying her on the thongs, patches and short shorts adorning their girlfriends? overexposed backsides. You have “Freedom Fests” where kids dress up in sumo pads and pound each other with padded hammers (I am not making this up, I swear) while their parents down monstrous quantities of fried Oreos and funnel cakes.
I think this would probably dismay our Founding Fathers in the same way Christmas at the mall might appall Jesus. These were not the “simple” men extolled in country ballads about red-blooded, redneck American guys.
Nope, they were kind of guys who, if they lived today, would certainly know the difference between Iraq and Iran. And I really doubt they?d show up for Independence Day in belly-hugging “patriotic” T-shirts with slogans like “Cross the Line and Your Ass is Mine.” (Though picturing Ben Franklin in “American by Birth, Biker by Choice” is kind of fun.)
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote not just about “unalienable rights” but also of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
Somewhere along the line, as we pursued happiness with vulgar gusto, that inconvenient “decent respect” thing hit the cutting room floor. We talk a lot about freedom in this country, but what we do with that freedom often is behave very badly, or at least in very bad taste. Heaven help you, my fellow American, if you choose not to supersize both your fries and TV and doubt that Dale Earnhardt was bodily assumed into heaven and is seated somewhere to the right of the Lord. You?ll never pass for a real American, particularly on July Fourth.
Of course, it?s still not too late.
Thanks to the Internet and express mail, you can still get nasty T-shirts, flag thongs and more proof of genuine American patriotism delivered to your door by the Fourth. Buy some tasteless junk and bare it all for freedom, and don?t forget the cherry bombs so you can blow up some model airplanes for the kids once you get really tanked. A bunch of prissy guys who liked big words, the kind of guys you?d probably evict from your barbecue with a biker boot to the backside, gave you the unalienable right.
Melanie Howard is a freelance writer living in Virginia and a National Magazine Award finalist published in Glamour, SELF, CHILD, Seventeen, Family Circle and other national magazines. Her columns also run regularly in the Waterbury, Conn., Republican-American and have been published in the Alexandria Times. She can be reached at [email protected].
