THINGS THAT GO *BANG* IN THE NIGHT

Ah yes… here it is – my least favorite holiday of the entire year. My neighborhood sounds as though it’s under attack, and despite the fact that I am feeling very ill and quite exhausted, there will be no sleeping through the explosions which rattle my windows at intermittent intervals.

The Fourth Of July – the day Americans celebrate the birth of their Great Nation by getting drunk and blowing shit up.

What exactly does this mean? What does it say about our image / conception of ourselves? What exactly are we celebrating and what symbolic meaning does the form of this celebration hold?

Once upon a time, I was actually patriotic. Then, I turned seven.

The year was 1976 and the culture was abuzz with the excitement of America’s two hundredth birthday. I was five and a half at the time – young, impressionable, and easily swayed by the opinions of others. In kindergarten, we had what I now refer to as “The Pageant of Propaganda” where we were required to dress up like famous patriots. We put on some kind of presentation / performance for the “older kids” who, I believe, ranged in ages from seven to ten. It was a very big deal.

I was Betsy Ross. I had my long frontier-esc dress and my matching bonnet and carried around my little partially sewn American flag. I chose Betsy Ross, perhaps, because there were so few female “heroes” that we had learned about in school and, perhaps, because I already knew a little about sewing. I remember the reds, whites, and blues and I remember feeling proud about something, though I had no real idea what.

Then, as I say, I turned seven. The bicentennial buzz wore off and America went back to what it used to be, to what it had always been, and I started looking around. For a year I had heard nothing but words like “freedom” and “liberty,” so I had assumed that those were the principles which were actually at work in everyday life in this Great Nation. Unfortunately, it was very difficult for me to find those things once the hubbub wore off and the words themselves were no longer on everyone’s lips.

Instead I saw hatred, oppression, racism, abuse, intolerance… I learned about the Native Americans who had been in this country before the white people came and decimated their populations. I learned that to embrace America was to embrace genocide. I learned that women and people of any color other than lily white were seen as “less than” by a large population of society, and although none of the white people were here in the first place, I learned the sneering tone of voice which many whites used when they said the word “foreigner.”

Aren’t you a foreigner? Aren’t we all foreigners here, oh Mister Lily White?

The ideas of the Founding Fathers sound so good on paper – it is the ideas that I believe in, though I sometimes have difficulty with how they have or have not played out in reality. Of course, for most people, it seems like the words are enough. Of course we have freedom – it’s right there in the song – it says so.

And, comparatively, we do. I have the freedom to sit here right now and question the meaning of freedom and ask whether any of us really have it or not. I have the freedom to ask, what the hell does it mean to celebrate something by getting drunk and blowing shit up?

At the bicentennial, America was two hundred years old. For a little kid, that seemed pretty old. Now that I’m a bit older and have actually studied history and the evolution of human civilizations, it seems a bit… young… if you ask me. Juvenile is actually the word which comes to mind. America seems like a big, spoiled testosterone kid with a lot of really big guns who thinks he is right about everything. That, I think, is what bothers me most – it takes a certain level of maturity to admit that, sometimes, we’re wrong. Sometimes we makes mistakes. Sometimes we’re just outright violent, selfish bastards. Do we, as a culture, have the maturity to see ourselves objectively, without the rhetoric, without the one-sided vision which just repeats the words we’ve been taught without considering their meaning?

Thus far, I think not, though I will say that more and more people seem to be reaching a personal level of maturity where they are able to view themselves and their culture in a more mature way, but those folks are few, far between, and generally much more well-educated than the average bottle rocket jockey.

Why did people REALLY come here in the first place? What values shaped this culture from the beginning? The two which come first to my mind are religious fundamentalism and greed. For some, America was a place where they could practice what, to the European mind, were ridiculously strict religions. And granted, that set the precedent for religious freedom, which I think is a very good thing. Ironically, it is often the same brand of fundamentalists who rant and rail against every other non-Christian religion as being “devil worship” or some such nonsense. I am certain the humor of this paradox is lost upon them, and I doubt that I could get a self-ironizing chuckle out of most, but I’m still amused.

Then, there’s greed. Who was it, exactly, who funded most of the major expeditions to the New World? Ah, yes… very large companies looking to make a quick buck on what they saw as a gold mine of as yet unmolested resources. All we have to do is get rid of those pesky Indians… Here—have some nice blankets. No antibodies for small pox? Ah well—you lose. Now that you’re all dead, you won’t mind if we just take over your land, do you?

Yeah America! Let’s blow shit up! And maybe we’ll get drunk so that we don’t have to think about it too much…

You know, I understand some fireworks. If there’s a loud noise, I don’t mind so much as long as something pretty happens. But with most of the Things That Go Bang In The Night, there is nothing pretty – it’s just a loud explosive noise with nothing beautiful to show for it.

To me, that is the way of violence – it’s just a big explosion where nothing beautiful happens. This booming and banging outside my house feels to me a celebration of unthinking violence, a time to celebrate an ethic which lies bellow the surface of most people’s conscious thinking, a time of excitement and family cohesiveness –hey! – Bobby’s four now – give the boy a firecracker and let him see how fun it is to be in control of making big scary noises! That should get him started down the right track… be a good citizen Bobby – go blow something up!

I have never seen violence make anything pretty happen. Until a war is called The Last War, it will never have solved anything, and hearing the explosions outside of my house makes me wonder how many human beings all over the world are hearing similar noises, only for them it indicates that their lives are in danger. For them, the sound of an explosion may be the last thing they hear, or it may indicate that their home is about to collapse around them, or that their mother, husband, child is now dead. How would they feel to hear our excessive free-for-all celebration of the sound of destruction? Do we, in our celebration of freedom, consider them or think of them at all? Or are we just interested in our own freedom, our own rights, our own ability to blow shit up?

So, Bobby, have another beer, flick that Bic and light ‘er up. And when you hear that boom, when you get that kick, when you feel that excitement, ask yourself – what does it mean to be an American?


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THE PRETTY STUFF

Now it’s later in the day… the fourth is more or less over, in fact, so I'm in a more positive mood. In the meantime, it got dark, I went outside, and I got to see the pretty stuff.

It is mostly during the day, I think, that the “stuff that just goes boom” happens, while at night you get to see more of the pretty stuff. Maybe doing so has shifted my attitude – I don’t know.

The thing is, I really do like people a lot. In fact, I think that sometimes I worry about them in that “I could just shake them” way that some mothers do. I happened to be sitting outside on my back porch when the neighborhood display next door started up, and because I was sitting there already, I got sucked in.

I realize how grateful I am that all the big BANGS! I hear outside are just people having a good time blowing shit up. As much as I have a difficult time wrapping my head around that, I am still very appreciative that those noises do not indicate something more sinister and menacing.

I also appreciate that events such as this particular decidedly outdoor holiday do bring people together. My house is situated right next to a parking lot for the Catholic church which sits on the street behind me, and excepting Sunday, it is always empty. The rest of the time, it is generally shared community space. It is where all the kids play kickball, where they learn to ride their bikes, where teenagers are patiently taught to parallel park, and where most of the neighborhood comes to set off their fireworks. It isn’t often that twenty or thirty of us end up outdoors together all at the same time, and that really is kind of nice.

The children clapped and squealed and folks brought folding chairs for the grandmothers and grandfathers. Everyone had a good time, and the early-teen children who helped with the lighting of the wicks were highly supervised and repeatedly warned of the dangers of standing too close. No one seemed drunk, irresponsible, rowdy, or otherwise unruly. I even donated my lighter when the Head Pyro’s ran out.

This is soooo different from the neighborhood where I used to live – they were all just law suits begging to happen. Lily White, drunk as bleach drinking monkeys and ready to blow themselves sky high...

I noticed that the fireworks I like are the same ones the “under four” crowd prefers, and the ones that make them cry are the same ones I don’t like either. Perhaps we must be socialized to accept that a really loud BANG with no other payoff is fun… maybe humans don’t really start out that way.

I also realized that my dichotomous feelings about fireworks very much mirror my like / dislike relationship to my country of origin. I forget that, for most people, cultural reality IS reality, and even though they may not know why they do what they do or what significance it might have, they are still, at the heart of it, good people who want to be happy and have fun. They don’t mean to glorify or support violence – maybe they just think that there MUST be a big explosion in order for beauty to exist.

And, sometimes, something pretty does happen, whether it’s a purple and pink starburst against the night sky or a community coming together to laugh, talk, and just be with one another. Closing my eyes, I was very grateful that we were all out there together to see the pretty stars falling from the sky rather than being together because we had been driven from our homes by artillery shells and bombing. I was glad that the sounds I heard were laughter instead of tears and that we were all there in the name of fun rather than terror. How similar those two sounds can be…

My feelings are mixed – as with most things, I’m of at least two minds. But, since I shared one of my minds, I figured it was only fair to share the other. Maybe I’ll write my own brand of patriotic chart-smashing song and call it “America – The Loud, Violent And Sometimes Beautiful.”

Does anyone know where I can find a skilled accordionist with a set of crash symbols at this hour?