Category: 4th of july
07/04/07 09:15 - ID#39916
Independence Day, not the bad movie.
You know what I find super cool about our Independence day?
Other nations celebrate their independence with the day they stormed a Bastille, or lopped off some head, or won some battle. But here in America, it is the day we signed a document a year after the fighting had begun.
Our independence is linked not to the comings and goings of power and the nation state, rather it is indelibly linked to a set of ideas. Ideas that even the founding generations found contentious and are even debated to this day. Women, for example, are not constitutionally made equal to men and an amendment to such has been debated in congress nearly every session since the 1920's. In a sense, this revolution is still going on. Not being made of armies and generals there is not point of 'mission accomplished'.
In terms of how we recognize our nationhood we are a nation of ideas; other nations are those of wars.
So why in the name of fuck's ugly grand daughter are drunken men throwing little colorful explosives in the air?
Or, more importantly, why are they doing it before it is dark out? You can hardly see them and are scaring the neighbors dog.
Have a few more beers, wait a few more hours, and when your alcohol thined blood is dripping on the floor of the local emergency room remember, those bullets fired and lives sacrificed do not make our nation. But the freedom to blow up your beer bottle in your hand does.
Good night, and Hern bless America.
Other nations celebrate their independence with the day they stormed a Bastille, or lopped off some head, or won some battle. But here in America, it is the day we signed a document a year after the fighting had begun.
Our independence is linked not to the comings and goings of power and the nation state, rather it is indelibly linked to a set of ideas. Ideas that even the founding generations found contentious and are even debated to this day. Women, for example, are not constitutionally made equal to men and an amendment to such has been debated in congress nearly every session since the 1920's. In a sense, this revolution is still going on. Not being made of armies and generals there is not point of 'mission accomplished'.
In terms of how we recognize our nationhood we are a nation of ideas; other nations are those of wars.
So why in the name of fuck's ugly grand daughter are drunken men throwing little colorful explosives in the air?
Or, more importantly, why are they doing it before it is dark out? You can hardly see them and are scaring the neighbors dog.
Have a few more beers, wait a few more hours, and when your alcohol thined blood is dripping on the floor of the local emergency room remember, those bullets fired and lives sacrificed do not make our nation. But the freedom to blow up your beer bottle in your hand does.
Good night, and Hern bless America.
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I have had to read his work for a few classes but ended up reading Democracy in America in its entirety because the excerpts were so damn good.
It always irritated me when people apply 21st century ideals to older thinkers. Dead people make such easy targets. Besides, America's impoverished class is made up mostly of those minorities that couldn't assimilate all those years ago. So, not much is different now than it was then, even the then first class penal system he came to America to study.
so, here here good sir.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who was traveling through the US in the early-mid 1830's, was one who ended up writing what I think is a truly brilliant analysis of American democracy, and although we're 170 years or so removed from the times much of what he wrote seemed almost prophetic. The ideals were correct, although some of what he wrote was fairly racist, which he gets criticized for I think unfairly since in the context of times I don't think ANYBODY felt that black folks or native Americans could assimilate into American society. That sort of line of thinking has proven to be wrong but his writings on American society are startling.