Fifty years ago this weekend, in the rearview mirror at least, the United States was as normal, as wholesome, as literally All American (football, University of Michigan) as our president at the time, Gerald Ford.
Since we personalize everything, sometimes even for good reason, Ford remains to me in memory the one Republican my liberal Texan mother ever voted for, simply because she found fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter smug and sanctimonious. (Anti-war, she also once voted for activist Dr. Benjamin Spock for president.)
Ford spoke that Fourth of July at the National Archives to celebrate the bicentennial of our nation’s freedom: “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order, the fixed star of freedom. It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.” Moral truths. How retro, coming from a president!
The summer of 1976 was the season before my senior year of college. My friends and I gathered in what was to become a tradition of many decades for a Yanks and Franks barbecue party at my family house on the banks of Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco for its excellent backyard view of the Rose Bowl and its bigger-than-ever bicentennial year fireworks show.
There were things wrong with our country, economically, socially, culturally. Punk rock happened for a reason: our society’s hypocrisy. The pointless, endlessly tragic Vietnam War, carried on through delusion and lies by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, had just disastrously concluded. But that Independence Day was a tall-ships vacation from any problems whatsoever. There wasn’t a one of us at the party who wasn’t on the whole entirely proud to be an American.
Last year I went to yet another Fourth of July barbecue above the Arroyo with dear friends — many of the same people who’d gathered half a century ago; I’m lucky that way — and I noticed something as soon as I walked in the door, sporting a red-and-white striped Brooks Bros. shirt above my blue jeans: I was the only one at the large party dressed in our national colors.
Out of anger and despair at the embarrassing common thief in the White House, the patriotism had shifted to a different republic: Our hostess had festooned the picnic tables with little California flags.
This year, if anything, it’s worse. The United States of America is still overseen, miserably, by the same felon-in-chief, but he’s now a complete international laughingstock, having launched and lost a really stupid war that quickly killed 13 service members, one for each original colony, cost Americans what will in the end be trillions of dollars and empowered the evil Iranian regime with new control over the world economy through the Strait of Hormuz.
This Fourth of July weekend, I’ve traveled far from our shores, seeking a little R & R in another country with red, white and blue in its flag. Can’t escape the newspapers, though: “I found out that nobody cared,” the American president says, about the revelation that he made $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses during his first year back in office.
Perhaps not nobody. I care. Probably you do as well. There’s a reason it’s unseemly for an American president to make billions while he’s in office, because he’s in office, our office: It’s not right. It’s a situation that needs to be righted. That’s our right.
The fact that we don’t have to accept this is the only reason we can still get up in the morning. Against all practical reason in the understandably jaded current political moment, we can still operate out of the optimism of that most American of poets, Walt Whitman, who sang: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, / I hear the workman singing and the farmer’s wife singing, the common people singing, / Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.” He praised Americans for “their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean.” He sang of “the fierceness of their roused resentment.” Use that to get through this.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.