Another June has gone by
“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”
-Edmund Burke
There’s something a little surreal about the events of the 4th of July weekend. It was the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
The years-long series of events planned to commemorate this were overtaken by the current American regime which used some of the earmarked money and a large amount of money from the National Park Service to put on what might charitably be described as a third rate county fair. Which is insulting because even a bad county fair is entertaining with animals and rides and food and music and it might be cheap but it’s at least trying to be fun, and the event on the National Mall in DC was apparently lackluster. Though it did have so many fireworks that the region had the worst air of any city on Earth. The worst part part was that while a lot of fireworks were shot off, making the air quality in the city some of the worst in the world, everyone says it was a very unimpressive display.
There’s a heavy-handed metaphor in those fireworks.
It’s hard to feel patriotic. More so because it was so painfully hot. Over 100 where I was and worse in New York and DC.
Two celebrities rented Madison Square Garden for a wedding. Which admittedly I did not hear about until the last minute, but it kinda felt like a joke. It still feels like a joke, but I expect very little of rich people or celebrities. The couple did donate many millions of dollars to charities, which is nice.
I mostly just watched the World Cup.
If I’m honest the vision of the world that we see visiting this country, and the glimpses of the US that they are seeing and posting online, is a vision of the world as so many of us experience it and believe it to be. One where despite our leaders and so many other people in power, we can more or less get along. And find joy in our common interests and obsessions and humanity.
I think this stands out because there has always been something about the Fourth of July. Here I’m forced to admit that I grew up with this American exceptionalism vision of the country and the world, maybe because I was a fish who didn’t know what water was. There were other holidays, and in summer there was of course Memorial Day, which wasn’t really the beginning of summer for kids since we still had to go to school until sometime in June and Labor Day, which we might have started school the week before or not, but marked the end of summer, but July was in between. It was a part of summer. The heart of summer.
We might be off at camp or we might be at home, but it was a holiday that was always small scale. There were parades in seemingly every town, a small scale affair with marching bands and scout troops and fire trucks. Cookouts as people grilled burgers and hot dogs accompanied by potato salad and cole slaw and early corn. Fireworks in the evening, though the day and the location varied as towns rarely did it all at one time and spread it out so fireworks fans could see many. There’s a way in which it felt like the most American of holidays because it was such a small scale affair. Local and neighborly and family oriented.
Raised in the belief, as de Tocqueville and others have written, that the small local Congregationalism of New England was a key force in the shape and the dynamics of the nation, I suppose that’s what it always felt like to me. A holiday of Thanksgiving. One where people watched the Boston Pops perform the 1812 Overture on the Charles River before the fireworks started, or the symphony played in Washington DC. Often on TV rather than in person. The President didn’t matter. This was an event for everyone.
Which is not the holiday that people voted for, I know.
It’s also marks the start of the second half of the year and I can’t help but think about this as a chance to rethink and reevaluate my goals for the year for the rest of the year. To look back and ahead. To think about all that has been lost.
I keep imagining the 250th as it could have been. A summer long festival on the National Mall under the aegis of the Smithsonian featuring musicians and artists and crafts and culture. Satellite events across the country as the world comes to visit the US for the World Cup and in every city where people are playing soccer, large scale events offering visitors a glimpse of this country as it is and was.
Instead we have ICE agents murdering people in the streets like the pathetic limp-decked losers they are. We started a war that is threatening to plunge our economy and the global economy into a recession. No one can explain the goal of the war, and the administration mostly treats us like peasants who don’t deserve to know. There are outbreaks of diseases affecting people and animals across the country. White supremacists march through the nation’s capital to mark the 250th.
This is America.
I think about that on the Fourth of July as I reread Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
It used to be possible to read the Declaration of Independence and Douglass’ speech and see them as the thesis and antithesis of the American experiment. To see this nation after the election of Barack Obama as an attempted synthesis, just as the 2008 election represented the other side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
It failed.
We live in a different country than the one I was born into. The Roberts Supreme Court But not as radically different as many claim, or would like to think. The question remains, what comes next?
Lin Yutang once asked, What is patriotism but a love for the food one ate as a child?
Cheeseburgers from the grill, piled high on a fresh roll with lettuce, tomato, ketchup. Early summer corn. Potato chips. String beans. Watermelon. Berries. Ice cream. Surrounded by friends and family. The town parade and firework show.
That is America. And it’s no longer enough. If it ever was.
Brian Doherty
I keep thinking of people who have died recently. Brian Doherty died a few months ago at the age of 58.
I knew Brian very slightly. A longtime writer and editor at Reason Magazine, which not being a libertarian is a magazine I am aware of but admittedly haven’t read much of, but I know his books. Doherty wrote Dirty Pictures, which is quite simply one of the very best books written about underground comics, and I would put on a short list of essential books to understand American comics.
It was not a book that comics embraced, for a few reasons. One, people didn’t like the title. Doherty admitted that the title wasn’t his idea, but he did agree to it. A complaint about the book was that it had no pictures, which people treated as a reason that the book wasn’t worth reading instead of a sign that the editor and publisher didn’t have faith in the book. Which is sad because he managed to talk to a lot of people before they passed away and captured a lot of voices and a lot of nuanced conversations that are not always acknowledged. I know that a few people complained that he had missed something. Something about the era, the energy, the creative frisson. I wasn’t there so I can’t say. They would likely say the same about my work, for all I know. But while people still talk about Patrick Rosencranz’s work like Rebel Visions, which I do not mean to put down, it's a very limited look at that era. Ultimately it’s a book about the Zap Comix Collective, that touches on the underground as a whole. What Doherty did was to talk to more people, to gather more voices. And to not just talk about the 60s and 70s, but to bring that story to today. To see that transgressive underground movement as central to the mainstream and literary and artistic embrace of comics as a medium. I mean I think that Doherty’s pointed juxtaposition at the end of Robert Williams and Barbara Mendes is something that should have gotten more attention.
Doherty was a fascinating writer. I liked his book on Burning Man and have read his other writing other the years. I don’t consider myself a libertarian, but good writing and insightful writing is rare. Occasionally, as in small parts of the book, I could feel his own political opinions coming to the fore, but for the most part he was a writer who was interested in other people. In how art and culture and politics manifests itself in different ways. In how people live and practice those ideas.
Bryan died young and we hadn’t talked for a while. All I can say is that I’m sorry he’s not around and that I won’t get to read him more.
More Recently
Gary Phillips is in the news. He has a new novel, The Haul, and the collection of a comics miniseries that he wrote. I interviewed him for CrimeReads. We’ve talked in the past about different books he’s written. I have read his novels before I talked to him the first time in a group interview with him, Christa Faust, and Charles Ardai about Peepland, the comics miniseries that launched the Hard Case Crime comics line. I interviewed him later about The Be-Bop Barbarians, a very underrated graphic novel, and Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem, a pulp novel he wrote featuring a version of the famed Arctic explorer. He’s been a great writer for years. His Ivan Monk novel from the 1990s are great books, and it’s sad that we didn’t get more of them. It’s been nice to see him get some more attention and recognition in recent years and he’s still curious and excited about work in a wya that is inspiring.
This is the summer of The Odyssey. If you haven’t read Emily Wilson’s translation, take this as an invitation. If you have, pick up Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation which was published last year by the University of Chicago Press. Mendelsohn is one of my favorite contemporary critics and one of the great classicists of the moment. I highly recommend his book An Odyssey. Which is much easier than the epic poem. It’s about his relationship with his father, who after retiring, decided to take his son’s undergraduate seminar about The Odyssey. It’s also interspersed with Mendelsohn detailing the poem and its themes, which if you’re not up for reading the poem, is a great way to be introduced to the ideas and themes and concerns of the book. And it’s a story of fathers and sons. I interviewed Mendelsohn about the book when it was released for The Millions in which we discussed the book, Homer, theater, comics, drama, and more.
One of the many things Mendelsohn and I spoke about was the Theater of War, which both of us had written about. It’s a project by Bryan Doerries, which performed some of the great Greek dramas for military and veteran audiences and used that as a way to talk about PTSD and trauma and grief. Because of the nature of Greek society, there’s not a one-to-one relationship. They saw the world in a fundamentally different way.
That said, if it serves as a starting point for people to think and talk. To see serving warfare and mourning one’s friends, heartache and loss, and be able to deal with one’s own pain, then it served its purpose. Grief and trauma and heartache and loss are there throughout human history. This is why we return to literature, to the great texts, to the oldest texts even. Because we see our lives and our struggles in them. Understand that we are not the first to feel these things. That we will not be the last. That we are a part of something. The great parade. Which stretches out as far as the eye can see in both directions. That we will fall along the way, but someone will pick up what we carry.
The late Stanley Kunitz wrote of “an art so transparent you can look through it and see the world” which is what so many of us aspire to create. Of course some people don’t even bother to read or watch, they just respond to what’s being said online for attention, and all they see is the mirrored surface of their phone, reflecting their own face, thinking that is the world.