The Fourth of July
A long time ago, in 1776 to be exact, the representatives of thirteen British colonies huddled precariously along the eastern seaboard of North America, a little less than three million people all told, met in Philadelphia to declare their independence from one King George III von Hannover, with whom they had disagreements that could no longer be settled peacefully. A couple of decades earlier, the Seven Years War with the French had spread to this out of the way place, King George II, the grandfather of the George in question, had used his military resources to remove a persistent threat from the French in alliance with various tribes of Native Americans to the North, and the King in Parliament demanded payment for the privilege.
My ancestors thought that this was intolerable. They, like most Englishmen of their day, were not represented in the body that claimed that everybody was implicitly represented by their betters, and Parliament insisted that these upstarts pay their taxes. In all fairness to my British cousins, they agreed to remove these intolerable taxes except for a symbolic tax on tea to show that these were, after all, British colonies. My ancestors became angry and dumped a load of taxed tea into Boston Harbor. People were poised to kill each other.
Honorable men from the thirteen British colonies met in Philadelphia. They thought that “when in the course of human events” it becomes necessary to dissolve the ties that have hitherto bound one group of people to another, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind (not the ladies, thank you) demands that they give a decent account of why. An extremely bright gentleman named Thomas Jefferson was appointed to write all these things up.
From the perspective of a couple of centuries and then some, we can criticize him for all sorts of things that he failed to say. All men are created equal, he said, and he probably did not have in mind people with different skin color either. In fact, one of the things George III was blamed for was not protecting the white-skinned settlers from the red-skinned natives who might have had the effrontery thought it was their land for the only reason that their ancestors had been there for 20,000 years or so. Thomas Jefferson had a slave woman whom he never quite got around to setting free, which might be one reason why America today is proud of so many Black citizens bearing the surname of Jefferson.
Well, we can pardon Mr. Jefferson for things that might not have occurred to him at the time. He opened the door for a great many things. In fact, about a decade after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, people got together to write the Constitution of the United States. An old friend of Jefferson’s, James Madison, came together with an old enemy of his, Alexander Hamilton, to write a justification of this document that seriously limited the independence of these thirteen United States of America. The Federalist Papers is an exceedingly serious document trying to think out how we govern ourselves.
It has its flaws. The womenfolk still had to fight for over a century to demonstrate that they were a least as bright as the menfolk, whom they had been outsmarting all along. America had a serious unpleasantness called the Civil War, which was about as destructive and bloody as any war up to that time. The Native Americans only got the full rights of American citizenship in the 1920s. But the American experiment has been so successful that it has the power to do things I sometimes really do not understand or approve of. I have to admit that I do not understand where the American government is looking for a Kolchuga radar system, which is obviously tucked away with all sorts of weapons of mass destruction that it tried to save the world from and now nobody can find. Saddam Hussein is or was not a nice man, and he did some bad things. But power has its limitations, and I really cannot empirically demonstrate why it is not a good idea for people to own people or why our sisters are at least as bright as those of us who have something different in our underwear. Mr. Jefferson said some important things that we are all eternally grateful for.
There was also another American president, Woodrow Wilson, who thought he could make the world safe for democracy. I think that this was not a terribly good idea. Our world is made up of sovereign peoples, no better and no worse than one another, but my kin in America have done some things worth everybody’s thought. This is why I celebrate with a beer, a hotdog, and a firecracker. Everybody is welcome to the party.
