There’s been a lot of other stuff, too, some of which I hope
to get to, perhaps combining two or more stories into a single post. But for now, perhaps it’s time to look at
where we are in general terms. The bad
news is everywhere: the tanking stock market; soaring inflation; the Russian
invasion of Ukraine; the fact that whoever the Presidential candidates in 2024
are, it’s extremely likely that Curmie will be voting for the less awful
candidate instead of one he actually supports.
And then there are those SCOTUS decisions that are depressing in both their
1950s world view and their predictability.
But it’s the 4th of July, and that takes on
special meaning this year. A lot of
Curmie’s Facebook friends are declaring that this isn’t Independence Day, it’s
just Monday (with a day off from work). One
friend (a man, by the way) wrote “This year’s Fourth has a different feel to
it, and it isn’t good.” Curmie hears
them. There is, perhaps, less to be
happy about, let alone proud of, today than many Independence Days past. But, glancing back at some of what I’ve written
on previous July 4s, there’s a trend.
Two years ago, the piece was titled “’... but it can be.’ A 4th of July musing,” borrowing a line from the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom.” The context is that for all its chest-thumping, the US is not, in fact, the greatest nation in the world… but it can be. Our reality doesn’t match our aspirations, but the solution isn’t to give up: it’s to do the work necessary to raise the nation closer to what we would like it to be. It certainly isn’t to roll over and concede. The otherwise depressing news from Ukraine should certainly have taught us this: to quote hockey great Wayne Gretzky, “you always miss the shots you don’t take.” Standing for something involves risk; Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an international hero for a reason. Barry Goldwater meant something altogether different in declaring that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” but those words themselves ring true: it’s just that Senator Goldwater and Curmie see “liberty” a little differently.
Four years ago, Curmie posted “Curmie Returns with a Bit of the Boss,” citing Bruce Springsteen’s song “Independence Day,” which has nothing to do
with July 4, of course, but which still resonates on this day. Especially relevant are these couple of
lines: “Because there's just different people coming down here now / And they
see things in different ways / And soon everything we’ve known will just be
swept away.” Disagreements about politics,
for example, ought not—in most situations, at least—end friendships. That doesn’t mean we should all “just get
along.” It does mean that unless we find
some common ground on even contentious issues like gun control and abortion, society
is going to unravel. Alas, there are ideologues
and authoritarians on both sides of such issues, and even recognizing the other
side’s point of view as anything other than outright evil seems problematic for
many.
One other early July post from years past also seems
relevant. Twelve years and two days ago,
Curmie wrote “The Lessons of Easter Week, 1916,” pointing out that the Rising of 1916 in Ireland failed to achieve anything that looked
like independence from England. And yet,
it did, because of English over-reaction: providing emergency medical care to
James Connolly so he wouldn’t die before they could shoot him, allowing a British
officer who ordered the deaths of three men almost certainly guilty of
literally nothing at all to plead insanity and retire to Canada on a full
pension, dumping the bodies of the executed revolutionaries in a mass, unmarked,
grave and covering them with quicklime.
The Irish people in general thought the Republicans (in the
Irish sense of that term) were annoying at best… until English arrogance was
allowed to show itself in full bloom.
Sinn Féin, the leading ultra-nationalist party, increased its membership
in parliament from 6 members to 73 in the first election after 1916. The more moderate Irish Parliamentary Party
showed a concomitant drop, from 68 votes to 7.
Oh, and the Irish Free State came into being less than six years after the
Easter Rising.
What all this means is that perhaps Michel Foucault was
right: that history happens not in events themselves, but in the interstices
between events. The Dodds decision in
particular was an event. It now remains
to see what history ensues. It just might be that over-reaching claims another victim.
The current Supreme Court has shown itself to be little
interested in obeying either precedent, even after promising to do so, in the
case of Dodds, or in the separation of church and state in the cases of Carson
and Kennedy. As noted above, Curmie hasn’t
read those decisions, and will speculate on his response only to this extent:
that he’ll be considerably less than surprised should he learn that these cases
were decided on the basis of political ideology rather than actual constitutional
issues.
The standard line among liberals is that the system is stacked
against anyone who isn’t white, male, rich, heterosexual, and Christian. The “male” and “Christian” parts of this aphorism
certainly seem to have been upheld by SCOTUS of late. We’ll see about the others.
It’s important to realize here that perceptions are as
important as reality in some regards.
No, we shouldn’t trust emotionality over reason, but certainly recent
events have served to make many people, and not just the easily persuaded,
distrust the system, and that’s not a good thing. There’s no question that we’re not going to
see the protection of individual rights (other than gun-toting) from this SCOTUS,
and they’re likely to be around for a while.
Short of drastic measures (which Curmie does not support), we’re not
going to have the citizenry prioritized over the interests of powerful entities
for a good long time. President Eisenhower
warned about the “military/industrial complex”; replace the military with
reactionary Christianity and that’s pretty much where we are now.
For all this, the conflict is not over. Curmie used to identify his political stance
as “from the radical middle.” That’s
beginning to be true, again. The party
of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell is indeed a threat to American democracy. But so are quotas, racial set-asides, and
cancel culture. Seriously, is there
anything positive to say about Biden/Harris other than perhaps, perhaps,
they’re a little less mentally unstable, a little less incompetent, a little less
wrong on the issues, and little less dishonest than their predecessors? So we should just pack it in, right?
In a word: no.
Curmie is a huge fan of the University of Kansas basketball
team. They’ve won two national
championships in the last 15 years. In
one championship game, the Jayhawks trailed by nine points with less than two
minutes to play. In the other, they
trailed by 16 early in the game and at the half by 15. They didn’t give up, and they were the ones
raising the trophy at game’s end.
All is not lost, today.
Curmie won’t guarantee we’ll get there—to the founders’ “more perfect
union,” to MLK’s “promised land,” to the greatness of our collective vision. But striving for less, accepting less, cannot
be countenanced. We must heed the words
of James Baldwin cited in the meme above: “I love America more than any other
country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize
her perpetually.” This is the opposite of the “love
it or leave it” rhetoric of the warhawks of Curmie’s youth. Rather, this is a call to arms to fight for what is
right… and despite its manifold failings, this nation has much that is positive
on which to build.
246 years ago, a collection of flawed but prescient men—virtually all of whom would be regarded as both racist and sexist by today’s standards—released a document, radical for its day, that changed the world. It was, of course, a seditious if not treasonous act, and it took more than a little courage to embark on a course that would inevitably lead to conflict with the world’s greatest military force. On that day, those 56 privileged white men pledged not only to each other but to a fledgling nation of their own creation, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. The current reality may not be worth this sacrifice, but the aspiration is. We forget or ignore that at our peril.
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