Happy Fourth!

My father sometimes liked to play a little trick on people.  And it was amazing to me how many of them — adults, as well as children — often fell for it.

“Does Canada have a Fourth of July?” he would ask.  And a surprising number would reply that, no, only America has a Fourth of July.  “Actually,” he would then point out, “Canada does have a fourth of July.  It comes right after the third of July, and just before the fifth.”

Today, of course, is the Fourth of July.  Which makes it Independence Day in the United States of America.  It’s a day of celebration.  It should also, I hope, be a day of remembering and of reflection.

I’ve been disturbed, over recent years, by a decline in appreciation for what we might call “the American project.”  Such a decline, in my experience anyway, is especially pronounced among younger people.  (I’ll probably reserve my thoughts on the mounting distrust toward our national political institutions for another occasion.)  There are many reasons for this decline in appreciation.  I think that they include the general climate of popular culture, as well as cynicism resulting from the traumatic war in Vietnam and the controversial recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I suspect, too, that attitudes among contemporary American educators and educational materials — at all levels, including elementary schools as well as colleges and universities — have played a pivotal role.  We commonly hear that America has been an oppressive place — racist, rapacious, misogynistic, patriarchal, imperialist, homophobic — and, to a very great degree, an actual force for evil.

I lament this trend.  I think it deeply misguided.  I even think it dangerous, not merely for the United States of America but for the world.  As Ronald Reagan famously pointed out during the Cold War, ““If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”

Does this mean that there are no other free places?  Obviously not.  Canada, for example, is free.  Crossing the border into Canada, one notices no obvious or immediate major differences with regard to personal liberty (nor, for that matter, with regard to much of anything else!).  In fact, there are plenty of countries where people are free.  As will be apparent to anybody who has followed this blog, I love Switzerland — for many reasons.  But one of those reasons is its fierce commitment to its own independence and to the freedom of its people.

And how long would such freedom and such independence survive without the United States?  And I’m not speaking only or even primarily about American military power — although the aggressive authoritarianism of Putin’s revanchist Russia and the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China (that is, by the way, still its official name) continue to probe and to challenge our military and would be delighted at its absence — but about a loss of American self-confidence and resolve.  If we no longer believe in the value of the American experiment, will freedom and independence continue to flourish elsewhere?  I don’t know.  I’m uncertain, and I would rather not make the test.

Germans are free.  The French and the Italians are free.  The Japanese are free.  Scandinavia is free.  Belgium and the Netherlands are free.  But within still-living memory, they were not.  Along with much of the rest of Europe, Germany was controlled by the monstrous evil of the Third Reich — and then, after the fall of Hitler, a substantial part of Germany fell under the equally monstrous evil of Soviet and Soviet-directed Communism.  (Here, I recommend the superb, Academy-Award-winning 2006 German film Das Leben der Anderen, which is available in English as The Lives of Others.)  Within still-living memory, France and Norway and Denmark and Belgium and the Netherlands were under Nazi occupation, Italy was under the control of Mussolini’s Fascism, and Japan served as the base for a lethal militaristic tyranny that operated in global league with the Nazis.  America was vital to their liberation.

Residents of the United Kingdom are free.  But at the end of the 1930s and in the early part of the 1940s, they were seriously threatened by the forces of Hitler’s Germany.  Without the assistance of the United States, how would they have fared?

I’m entirely in favor of correcting naïvely, even dishonestly, boosterish oversimplifications of American history.  Slavery was a crime not only against black people but against our fundamental founding principles, as was government-imposed or -supported segregation.  Native Americans suffered terrible injustices at the hands of European Americans.  And the American flirtation with naked, unashamed, overt colonialism and imperialism that began in the late nineteenth century led to many actions by individual leaders and, sometimes, by America itself, that make me blush today because they so plainly violated the ideals of our democratic-republican Founders.  (Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States is both a real eye-opener and profoundly humbling, even though, reading it, I’m not certain that we could have altogether avoided that phase of our history under the international conditions of the time.  Unfortunately, though, folks like Teddy Roosevelt went in for American colonialism with what seems to me a rather unseemly gusto.)

We need to see our history honestly and clearly; only then can we improve.  Claims that our nation is perfect have no support in our history, and should have none in our patriotism or our politics or our self-understanding.  Do we not, after all, when we sing to “America the Beautiful,” pray that “God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! . . . God mend thine every flaw! . . .  May God thy gold refine till all success be nobleness, and every gain divine”?  America is a place for mending, for refinement.  Not for reviling or rejection.

The United States have been, overall, a force for vast good in the world.  (Please note the plural verb.  It’s deliberate here, and was once standard — as, indeed, it is strictly grammatical.) I repeat that:  America has been a very great force for good.  My Scandinavian immigrant paternal grandparents certainly thought so.  And so did many millions of others like them.  The problem seems to me that many modern critics of this nation unfairly compare it to a never-realized utopian ideal and — inevitably —  find it wanting.  Compare it more reasonably to the history of previous states, though, or to the more recent history of its post-1776 contemporaries — to Mexico, say, or Cambodia, or Paraguay, or Brazil, or Rwanda, or South Africa, or Belgium, or India, or Japan, or China, or Russia, or Germany, or Peru, or France, or Korea, or Cuba, or Nigeria, or even the United Kingdom — and the historical flaws of America come into a very different perspective.  We don’t fare well when compared with Wakanda, but we do quite a bit better when contrasted with Uganda.

P.S.:  We’re just back from watching Top Gun: Maverick.  A kind of paean to the American military, it seemed an appropriate thing to see on American Independence Day and, anyway, we may be among the last people in the United States to have seen it.  When I first heard that it was coming, I feared that it would be a pathetic sequel in which Tom Cruise sought to retain his youth a little too late.  But it wasn’t.  I began noticing favorable reviews and, since returning from Europe, hearing really positive comments from friends, and it turned out to be very well done for the kind of movie it is.  Those who made it cleverly never identify the “rogue state” that is central to the movie’s plot and we never actually see any of their faces, so there are no ethnic clues.  For most of the film, the visuals led me to expect it to be a Middle Eastern country.  Later, though, it was very clear that my expectation was wrong.

In any event, I wish everybody a happy fourth of July.  Even those of you who may be in Canada.  (And, for folks in Australia and New Zealand and Japan who have already left 4 July 2022 behind, I hope that you’ll have a good fourth of July in 2023.)  We ourselves will be on the road very shortly to join members of our extended family for a holiday barbecue.  We’re Americans; accordingly, it’s a day for reflection, remembrance, and celebrations.