I remember not only the ideals but how often my country has failed to live up to those ideals.
Sometime everything about my country seems like a lie.
For all the sloganeering about freedom it seems in damned short supply if you are not a rich white Protestant man of a certain class and breeding.
So let us see What should I celebrate on the Forth of July?
Shall I celebrate the genocide of nearly an entire race of people who once inhabited this fair nation and the relegation of the rest to the meanest most barren, isolated and desolate parts of it?
Shall I celebrate the enslavement of people originally from Africa but now American upon whose whip scarred backs the original wealth of the nation was built?
KKKonservative historical revisionists call the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. A monumental act of denial on the order of that of Nazi Symps who deny the holocaust and the murder of not only 6 million Jews but also millions of others. War of Northern aggression my ass, more like the War of Southern Treason. Slavery isn’t one bit prettier if you try to disguise behind the current Southern Republican racists’ pet phrase, “Atlantic Triangular Trade”. It was the fucking slave trade. The buying and selling of human beings. God Bless America…
Now we abuse the economic refugees from Mexico just as we did the Irish, the Poles, Italians and thousands upon thousands of other immigrants from Europe and Asia before them.
Platitudes tell me how how equal we are. Jim Crow laws from my childhood replete with lynchings give lie to that one.
Busted heads on picket lines, beatings for peaceful sit down strikes, black lists and employment terminations make the very idea that we have freedom of speech a joke.
In the 1960s it was illegal for someone with transsexualism or transgenderism to dress in a way that reflected who they knew themselves to be. Sodomy was a criminal offense in almost every state in the nation.
For a bright and shining moment we called the 1960s and the 1970s it looked as though we would finally actualize the ideals of this nation.
But with the election of Reagan and the subsequent neo-cons and neo-libs we have descended once again into the swamp of bigotry, imperialistic wars, denial of rights.
The lies that are told about the 1960s do to that era what the right wing historical revisionists have done to our entire history and that is replace history with mythology.
Women Born Transsexual 
July 5, 2010 at 4:45 am
Actually that bigotry started to be installed at the time of Carter. Reagan capitalised on it and enforced it substantially.
July 5, 2010 at 9:49 am
It may have to do with my age but I would date the end of the age of sixties idealism among the young in the U S, anyway, around the time of the Yom Kippur War when the country was experiencing its first oil shortage, and when Nixon was being pressured to resign. I think there were a lot of people genuinely afraid that New Deal and Great Society policies along with the anti-war movement would create real change in this country, where the dominance of the power elite had already been eroded.
The two energy crises had a devastating effect on the standard of living with the high inflation and unemployment that persisted throughout the seventies. It made it impossible to maintain the kind of lifestyles people enjoyed who were living counter culture existences.
People like George H W Bush and Henry Kissinger were already working behind the scenes in the mid seventies with Bush in charge of the China Foreign Office and then head of the CIA and Kissinger arranging the arms deal with Iran that would eventually lead to the overthrow of that government. That lead to William Casey secretly making deals with the revolutionary regime during the 1980’s election.
I will never forget how stunned I was to see Reagan delivering his inauguration address in front of a banner that read “The New Federalism. I translated that as “The New Feudalism”, which it obviously became, with all its trial by ordeal religious politics and medieval moral values. The most stunning thing about the whole inauguration scene was twenty minutes into Reagan’s speech when it was announced the Iranian hostages were landing at Dulles International Airport, which of course became Reagan International.
Carter’s election seemed to hold out hope for reform and change. It, of course, was a set up for Reagan. Carter was too weak and vacillating to stand up against the establishment which made Carter’s tenure ripe for the sort of policies Reagan was able to sell the public on. Zbigniew Brzezinski was an overpowering figure in Carter’s administration. His legacy is the kind of Popes who have been running things, the Soviet mafia, and Afghanistan.
July 5, 2010 at 11:44 am
I beg to differ.
This country has always had a yin and yang. Its Jefferson and its Adams, its Lincoln and its Davis.
The American Revolution was different from the French Revolution or Russian Revolution in that it was a bourgeois anti colonialist war, whereas the others were a rising up from below to destroy the ruling classes.
There were factions who would have made Washington king rather than President. Adams was the first to institute Joe McCarty type laws with his Alien and Sedition Act.
After the Civil War the company thugs, the National Guard and the Pinkertons who were the Blackwater of their day beat and murdered the workers who tried to organize unions.
The labeled every single movement aimed at fruthering both workers rights and human rights as either communist or anarchist. As a result to be part of these movements was to be either a red or a black and sometimes both.
The good old days that the Republicans want to return us to are not the Disneyfied fictional 1950s but more like those of the Gilded Age of the 1890s.
It might be a good idea to ask if Teddy Roosevelt would be considered a Republican today with his support for conservation and his willingness to bust up monopolies. Of course not even the Democrats of today have the guts to bust up monopolies or conglomerates
Woodrow Wilson had his own Sedition laws and people were thrown in prison for speaking negatively about US involvement in WW I.
The Dee’s Committee that became HUAC was part of the campaign on the right against FDR and the New Deal. Corporatists like the anti-Semitic Henry Ford actually supported Hitler and the Nazis as did many conservatives.
All through out the supporting of civil rights and equality for black people, unions, social justice, women’s rights, freedom of speech all were always attacked as being communist.
Hell the right wing even labeled Eisenhower as being red.
FDR was one of the few progressive Presidents and LBJ was the last of the New Deal Presidents.
This country is by and large ruled by and for the benefit of the rich and powerful. To contest that is to be red.
Liberals simply put a velvet glove over the same iron fist, they all serve the same Moloch of naked corporate-fascism and a police state.
July 5, 2010 at 10:22 am
Sorry,
I meant the Russian mafia, not the Soviet mafia. Same emperors, though, just new clothes. While I am at it – another of those in your face ironies that no one seemed to pay attention to – Kissinger’s marriage to David Rockefeller’s personal secretary, Nancy McGinnis. How could Gloria Steinem ever have dated a creep like that?
July 5, 2010 at 3:57 pm
The reality is, Andrew Jackson was the last USA president who actually had a backbone.
Jackson was far from perfect by any standard, but for his day, he really stood out.
Andrea Jackson attacked every vested interest, which is why he is so hated today. Then again, he was concieved in Ulster and born in the USA, so he was genetically guarenteed to pick a fight with everyone around him, including the idiot who tried to kill him.
Franklin D Roosevelt was the last president of the United States worth shit. He created new deal, put millions to work and laid the groundwork for the program to get US soldiers into university after military service. That education program did more to change the USA than any american will ever realise. Unfortuantely traitor anti-soldier presidents ever since, have made continous attempts to water that down.
The problem is, it has been downhill ever since.
July 5, 2010 at 5:14 pm
I don’t disagree with anything you say, Suzan, in your reply. I was only speaking of the post sixties era which extended into the early Seventies. I am sorry to hear about your friend.
Andrea, Jackson was a populist but haven’t you ever read anything about this :
“Andrew Jackson was the first U.S. President to implement removal of the Native Americans with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
I think Suzan is correct about yin and yang in American Politics.
July 5, 2010 at 8:21 pm
I am so very sorry to hear of the passing of your friend, Suzan.
Reading of your participation in history, the friendships you have made, the “interesting life” you have lead, thoughts raise themselves before me:
The true measure of a country is the people that grow up sometimes almost in spite of, not only the country’s ideals, but the reality of its political economy; the struggle that generates the lives and histories that measure what a country has achieved or how a country has failed.
When I think of America, magnified through the lens of your life, I feel a great melancholy for the passing of the truly great pioneers, the rebels–even those most conformist!–those who struggled not only with themselves but also the “truths” they had received.
This is what you, and all Americans, should be celebrating this Independence Day, Suzan!
This is the greatness!