Fourth Of July - Celebrate A Racist, Genocidal Country? The New Anti-Patriotism

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?

Marlene had gritted her teeth every Fourth of July, smirked at the flags and parades and barbecues.  The floats from which ex-genocidaires waved, a pompous, ridiculous show of patriotism for dismally failed country; but this year, the 250th was the worst.  It would be the most garish, insipidly bourgeois, demeaning show of faux patriotism the country and the world had ever seen. 

'Goddamn him!', she shouted as the Navy jets roared overhead and down the Potomac, practicing their tight maneuvers for the flyover.  'Goddamn him', she yelled when she heard the high school band playing march music on the football field.  

It was too much, and she was at the end of her rope.  She had done all the could, devoted decades of her youth to progressivism, and what did she have to show for it.  A fool in the White House and the dismantling of every noble, humanitarian policy she and her fellow progressives had fought long and hard. 

'Calm down', said her neighbor, a fellow progressive but one more tempered by a study of history; a friend who worried about the disassembly of a good woman. 

 

When she heard Marlene's frantic cries, she rushed next door to comfort her friend and provide whatever solace she could. Politics are febrile, changeable, predictably absurd and never permanent. 

This time, however, was different, and what she saw was frightening.  Marlene had become a madwoman, her hair wild and unkempt; her dress torn and the hems, now black and stained, dragged the floor.  She trembled and then shook with violent paroxysms of hatred.  She spat, foamed, and cried, her voice hoarse and miserable. 

She was not alone.  Professor Harding Phillips, Professor of Social Psychiatry at Stanford had recently written about the surprising depth of emotional disturbance in those who opposed the President and his policies and had recently written about emotionally existential events which pushed many over the edge. 

The American progressive suffers more than any opposition in American history.  Not even in the antebellum period when the country was preparing for war was there so much political hysteria. Plantation owners were hateful and resentful of the sanctimonious North but channeled this hate into political and military action.  The abolitionists in Pennsylvania and New England were incensed over the persistence of slavery and the militant defense of it by plantation owners; but organized a political movement to effect policy change in Washington. 

Today's social activists have no such reasonability.  Temperance and practicality are tantamount to treason.  The venomous hatred with no objective outlet has turned malicious and viral, just waiting for a casus belli.  The virulent and malicious expressions of hatred for America which erupted as Washington celebrated 250 years of statehood were understandable.  Only madness, complete abandonment of social propriety and probity would suffice.  It was as though every insane asylum on the continent had emptied its inmates. 

In her agitated, untethered state nothing in America over the last 250 years seemed good, praiseworthy and noble. If the United States became a world industrial power during the Industrial Revolution, its successes were built on the backs of the poor.  The Robber Barons had robbed the worker of his dignity, amassed great personal fortunes and let the poor suffer in miserable, intolerable conditions. 

The famous 'democracy' of America was nothing less than a chimera - a fanciful political creation to favor the wealthy and the white male elite.  Its economy built on individual enterprise was nothing but cronyism and bald aggressiveness leaving the less fortunate in its wake. 

Of course not everyone had been so infected by this viral hatred so common in American progressives. Nothing was perfect and as Winston Churchill said, 'Democracy is the world's worst political system except for all the rest'.  Historically mediated culture could not be dismissed.  Each period of American history - Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, Robber Barons, slavery, and the oppression of women all had historical antecedents.  Political philosophies were neither good nor bad.  They just existed, came and went, were replace by others which fell just as precipitously. 

To hate was to ignore history, philosophy, culture and the laws of chance.  It made no sense, it isolated people within narrow, unpleasant confines, robbed them of any real purpose or satisfaction. Hating was a miserable affair. 

 Marlene couldn't seek psychiatric attention, for that would deny the legitimacy of her hate; and hate was the only legitimate response to the predatory, inhuman, malignant presence of Donald Trump.  The 250th Fourth of July was her defining moment, the one from which there was no return, and so she was committed rather than admit herself to St. Elizabeth's.  She went in a straight-jacket, held by two hefty matrons, and was carried off in a van, not even an ambulance. 

This could be her only end - and that of the thousands like her who have so completely lost social traction that a normal life was no longer possible.  St. Elizabeth's was the end of the road. 

No one missed her, not even her progressive colleagues who had sympathized with her agony over the years.  They were sorry for her, but were glad that she was in a place where she regrettably belonged. Not good riddance exactly but she had given progressives an especially bad name.