Blowing Things Up On The Fourth Of July - How Sparklers Define The New Anti-Patriotism

Randy Harper always looked forward to Fourth of July because he could blow things up.  Fireworks were available everywhere - Jimmy's Smoke Shop carried cherry bombs and ashcans - but the real McCoy was Mickey Finn's on the Berlin Turnpike.  Mickey carried military grade explosives packed into small packages. He sold something called The Killer a pirated clone of the M-80, an American class of large powerful firecrackers which were originally made in the mid 20th century for the U.S. military to simulate explosives or artillery fire. 

How Mickey got his hands on this explosive which did not hit the general commercial market until a number of year later was always a mystery; but there it was, flying off the shelves for the likes of Randy Harper and his father who intended to blow things up on the Fourth.  

Randy had always liked to drop cherry bombs into trash cans filled with water and watch the simultaneous bulging and bursting of the container and the sky-high geyser of water from the explosion, but now that he had The Killer, capable of a Hiroshima firestorm, he was particularly excited.  This would be a Fourth to remember. 

The only problem was to decide what to blow up.  Just setting off The Killer just resulted in a loud explosive sound and a small crater in the back yard, but figuring out how to make it really do some damage and send things flying like the epochal scene in Zabriskie Point was another thing altogether.  

A chain reaction was what he wanted - The Killers set off in sequence, blowing up old stumps, flower pots, trash cans and steamer trunks in succession.  A real life battlefield of terror and destruction. 

World War II had just ended and the young boy listened fascinated at stories of how his father blew things up on his way from Normandy to Berlin - tanks, armored personnel carriers, bunkers, and German military headquarters. 

There was nothing more satisfying that sending a rocket into the lead tank in a Nazi panzer division, watching to top hatch blow off spinning a hundred feet into the field, and gunning down the crew as they scrambled up and out. He remembered the smell of cordite, and how the muzzle of his Browning glowed a dull red with the heat as laid down constant fire, eliminating any and all who fled the destruction of the tank convoy. 

When the Fourth rolled around, Bill Harper taught his son how to fight with Roman candles.  These fireworks shot off balls of fire in a shower of sparks and light, and when coordinated, provided a backyard sound and light show the envy of the neighborhood; but when leveled and used as a firearm, they could simulate battle.  Randy loved them and they were sure to stock up at Mickey Finn's weeks before the Fourth to beat the rush. 

The Fourth itself on Commonwealth Avenue was like the Battle of the Marne - explosives going off in every back yard, shaking foundations, singing the bark off of old oaks, and sending curled, blackened leaves floating down to the ground. 

Randy, now a father and grandfather, remembered those days well especially because now the only fireworks available were sparklers - twinkie gay things that did nothing but spark and smoke and wither down to nothing.

Randy, a patriot, a Republican, and a defender of America's glorious history, saw the sparkler as the meme of a feminized America - insipid, tame, inclusive, diverse, and frilly. Risk - the be-all and end-all of manhood was being removed.  Playgrounds offered no challenges, competition was absent on field days, boys were cossetted and silenced by feminist teachers, drugged by complicit parents, and lost and fumbling about with their innate rambunctiousness neutered. 

The homes in his neighborhood - a leafy enclave in affluent Northwest Washington - displayed no flags on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day.  Flags were not only a sign of approval of what had always been a racist, genocidal, misogynist country and a Trump Make America Great banner. 

His next door neighbor, Marlene Flint, wanted no part of this year's Fourth.  Donald Trump had made it all about himself like he has done everything else - the ballroom, the Arch, the Field of Heroes, the makeover of the Kennedy Center - and this celebration of the republic's 250th year would be no different.  It would be the same posturing, arrogant travesty of American history that has characterized his presidency since the beginning. 

  

Besides, what was there to celebrate about a country which had enslaved the black man since 1619, had committed genocide of the Native Americans in its Manifest Destiny push to the Pacific, and had created the world's greatest threat to world peace with its exceptionalism and military adventurism. 

There would be no flag flying from her porch, nor would there be any flags and bunting in her neighborhood, solidly progressive, anti-Trump, and dedicated to a reversal of the current misfortune and the creation of a new, socially generous, verdant, and harmonious world. 

She was quick to call out the very hypocrisy of a country which encouraged the barbarism of enslavement, and went about its Gone with the Wind cavalier ways for centuries - mint juleps on the verandah, hoop skirts, and antebellum magnificence while African slaves toiled under the hot sun in Delta cotton fields.

  

She had no pride in American military victories - Jackson had sold out the Chickasaws and Choctaws in the War of 1812, using them as cannon fodder against the British and then exiling them west of the Mississippi after the war was over.  The victory over Japan in WWII was at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese who were incinerated by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ignoble affairs, carried out with some vague notion of democracy but were actually no more than pursuits of American hegemony. 

She felt no pride in American social history, for it had treated women as slaves until the early Twentieth century, and had closeted gay and lesbian Americans since the dawn of the Republic. 

What in fact, was there to celebrate?  What more arrogant, mind-numbing assumption of greatness could be imagined in the follies of the Fourth this year?

She would light a few sparklers for her grandson, have grilled fish and baklava for dinner, considering the backyard barbecue a bourgeois, faux patriotic tradition, and shut all the windows to block the bombardment of Trump fireworks. 

Marlene Flint was not alone in her silent protest of the excesses of American exceptionalism.  Other residents of University Park flew gay pride and Palestinian flags, deployed Hate Has No Home Here and Democracy Matters lawn signs, and shook their heads in dismay and disgust at the military aircraft flyovers - the very same bombers which had reduced Gaza to rubble and were killing Iranian patriots. 

Sparklers, 'inclusivity', compromise, compassion - signs of the end not the beginning of American culture.  The United States had just defeated an oppressive colonial regime, declared independence, and founded a country based on unequivocal principle - individualism within an ethos of polity; military strength to defend freedom; economic power to grow the new republic into the world's most productive. 

Many viewers heard Bill Maher's rant about our feminized society. Fewer have listened to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, and a critic of modern feminism.



Progressives for years have worried about the war against women, how it has not been won, and how society must cleanse itself once and for all of the scourge of predatory men.  Men are retrograde, illiberal, and irremediable. They are obsessed with guns, violence, and competition; and are social throwbacks.  Only women have evolved to a higher state of being; and are the only bulwark against male social anarchy.  Their caring, compassionate, collaborative, and participatory ethos has saved us all.

As paraphrased by Dana Antiochus, Maher believes that

The inversion of nature that we have experienced as a culture, and the subversive aspect of flipping traditional roles, with its subsequent destruction of society, serves as a signal that we live in a dying system.  It has led to a pussified, sissy, pathetic, lovey-dovey/touchy-feely country of wimps, who put emotion over logic, feeling over reason, in our nurture-heavy/nature-deprived, culture

That and more, thought Randy. His old M-80 was still intact, on his desk along with other memorabilia. He thought that this would be the year he would finally blow it off, created one hell of a crater in his back yard or better yet that of his next door neighbor, set her squirrel-proof bird feeders a-swinging and putting a crack in the birdfeeder; but he had too many sunken costs to gin up what it takes to send a message which, given the universal tenor of the neighborhood would only strengthen their resolve. 

So to the consternation of his daughter-in-law, Randy sat down with his grandson and told him about the good old days of Sturm und Drang; but that just made him feel old.