Forget the Fourth, but not the Fireworks

I just got back from the fireworks downtown.

As a sign of the times, there was a scare a month or two back when radio behemoth Clear Channel, the company that normally pays for most of the cost, backed out. Ignore the Chamber of Commerce press releases; the U.S. economy is still in bad shape. But there was enough support from the community, which created a donation-based non-profit to put on a show... though you could tell it was done on a smaller budget. In particular, the "grand finale" lacked the sheer how-many-more-of-these-are-they-gonna-shoot-off scale of prior years'.

For the record, I haven't been able to really enjoy the Fourth of July in over a decade. The President's father gets the credit for that, by starting our first war with Iraq. It wasn't just the war that alienated me (which it did), but also the aftermath, in which the American media got down on its collective knees to enthusiastically fellate anyone who had any connection with it, brushing the whole question of whether it was a "just" war and whether we had "won" under the rug they were kneeling on.

The straw that broke this particular camel's back was when the elder Bush visited Grand Rapids and turned our Independence Day parade into a flag-waving display of military force, with lots of uniformed soldiers and - I shit you not - a fucking tank rumbling through the streets, like some kind of twisted parody of a Soviet May Day parade, or the crushing of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Meanwhile all the local sheep patriots waved their flags and some bimbo on a float with an amplifier sang some kind of anthem worshipping our beloved troops and... whatever cause they'd been sent over for. I stood on the sidewalk carrying a piece of posterboard that said "wars don't make us great"... and got heckled ("yes they do!"), sneered at ("thanks for ruining the parade") and even threatened. Which convinced me that the average American (or at least the local variety) has the intellectual sophistication of a turnip. I may be a United States citizen, but I am not an "American" in that sense of the word.

But I still enjoy a good fireworks display. The noise. The bright lights. The artistic beauty of them.

When I was a kid the family always went to the fireworks over the little lake in one of the suburbs a few miles from our house. Since I moved back to the city as an adult, I've usually gone downtown for the bigger display there. I've lived within a couple miles of downtown since then, so it's always been either a moderate walk or a short bike ride away. I located a green spot (the lawn surrounding a playground) on one of the hills overlooking downtown proper, that has a pretty good view of the 'works, and I've gone there every year except the one I was out of the country that day. At least from where I watch, there are no stomach-churning stars and stripes flapping in my face. No nationalist anthems being played (at least within earshot). No fucking tanks. Just an amiable polyglot crowd, a view of the downtown I've always thought of as "home", and a bunch of pretty explosions. As long as I think of "America" in those terms, I'm OK with it.