Monday, Jul. 07, 2003 - 11:50 a.m.

Jingo Day

Several weeks ago, I started hearing bombs exploding. Late at night, sometimes after midnight, I’d hear these loud booms, some grand ones far in the distance that sounded like artillery fire, and other detonations very close by. One loud one woke me from a sound sleep. I had no idea what was going on. I was going to write a post entitled, “Sarajevo, USA” because it sounded like the Serbs were shelling Eugene from the surrounding hills.

It took me a while for it to dawn on me that these were fireworks and firecrackers that some jerks were setting off because they couldn’t wait for Independence Day. Now, a few days after the 4th, I’m still hearing them. It turns out that Oregon must be one of those states where fireworks are totally legal, not like where I grew up. In the parking lot of the mall, there is a grand circus-sized tent that contains an enormous fireworks store. Fireworks are for sale in the supermarket.

I heard that the Chinese originally invented explosives for use in fireworks, and only later were they used to kill. I was glad that with all the cacophony, only an occasional finger was amputated. I wonder, do emergency rooms schedule additional staff to work on the Fourth? Do they have a cooler full of vat-grown replacement fingers and a drawer full of mechanical cyborg fingers ready and waiting to be grafted on?

Ever since I got a clue, I have hated the Fourth of July. Luckily, I was living at Twin Oaks Community most of that time, where they have the sense not to celebrate it. When I moved to Richmond, I threw a Fourth of July party in my back yard, but I had the old black flag flying then off a tetherball pole. And last year, I was at the Rainbow Gathering where everybody got in a huge circle and did a stupid om thing. But my greatest Fourth of July was when I went to the Louisa County Fair. I was standing in line for one of the carnival rides. The ride operator had a boom box set up and was entertaining himself with loud heavy metal music. At 9 O’clock the fireworks show began overhead. Did I hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” being played to mark that patriotic occasion? No. Much more fitting, I heard Twisted Sister singing, “You’re Gonna Burn In Hell”.

On July third, I was pleased to see the Eugene Weekly’s cover with this picture:

with the caption, “Watch Your Back.” But the cover story against the USAPATRIOT Act was just more deluded liberal tripe about how the Bill Of Rights is the source of our freedom. When will people stop trading their automomy for promises on paper? It reminds me of that great quote by Butler Shaffer that said, “a person who holds up the Constitution as a guarantee of their freedom is like a dog who has learned to carry its leash in its mouth.”

Wolfi Landstreicher put it wonderfully: “…the opposition of rights to privilege is a false opposition. It is nothing more than a disagreement over how the higher power should value us and an appeal to it to recognize our value. As such the struggle for rights is nothing more than a struggle to sell oneself at a higher price. At its most radical, it becomes an attempt to sell everyone at the same price. But some of us do not want to be sold at all.”

So most Americans wouldn’t recognize independence if it bit them on the ass. I passed a middle-aged couple wearing matching flag t-shirts. I had to hold back my impulse to seig-heil them. Apparently, freedom is popularly understood to mean obedience.

In 1999, I was driving around Rhode Island with some friends from Germany. They asked why there were flags everywhere we went. I answered frankly, “because this is a fascist county.”

After the World Trade Center bombing, when flags were sprouting up on every imaginable surface in Richmond, Virginia, I made up this flyer to try to talk some sense into the masses.

On the Fourth, I ran into an old acquaintance who told me how he had been arrested for burning an American flag at a peace protest a few months ago. It warmed my heart to hear that because I knew that he had intended to communicate a message along the lines of, “look at all the bad things the US government has done and continues to do! This flag doesn’t symbolize good stuff after all! Down with this nasty government and its homicidal global empire!” Unfortunately, I bet the message others heard was, “Look at me! I’m an evildoer! I detest your freedom! So do bad things to me!” I recommend against flag-burning for another reason as well: it just reinforces the delusion that the flag means something. It must be of great import, or else why would you take the trouble to burn it? That’s why I recommend flag-scoffing, or better yet, flag-forgetting.

If anyone tells me that people died for that flag, I’ll tell them that I feel really sad when I hear that someone gave up their life (something real, unique, and infinitely valuable) for a flag (a purely symbolic, practically worthless, and very replaceable piece of cloth.) It is that faith in, and allegiance to flags which allows masses of people to be manipulated into committing the most horrendous atrocities imaginable. That’s why a major part of my personal mission is to dissuade people from worshiping flags.

So I’m walking out of Taco Bell, and across the parking lot I see a U.S. flag flying on a flagpole. Without thinking, I feel a great rush of pride and warm fuzzies. A moment later, I’m like, “what the fuck? Bad anarchist! Bad anarchist!” Residual conditioned response from childhood, I guess.

Though a contrasting memory from childhood is of the sing-song chant my peers recited when I was in kindergarten: “Red, white, and blue makes a monkey out of you.”

I feel alarmed when I see this truck’s sticker. However, someone (the owner? Someone else?) crossed out “Israel” and wrote in “Jesus”. On another vehicle (not pictured) I saw the same sticker on which someone had crossed out “Israel” and wrote in “Iraq”.

On a brighter note, here are some more lawn signs from around town. I see as many of these in Eugene as I see flags:

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Since I was surrounded by booming and cracking and whistling anyway, I figured I should at least get a better look at it. I biked up to the top of College Hill (no college there, the college is on another distant hill) to the reservoir which is not a lake, not a man-made lake (constructed by the patriarchy), but rather several Olympic-sized swimming pools completely paved over with concrete. A lot of people were up there watching the fireworks in the distance, and setting off a lot of their own, including screaming, sparking geyser things that hurt my eyes and ears. There was a beautiful professional fireworks show to the east, and to the west I looked out over the Eugene. It was like one of those movies where you can see all of Los Angeles from up in the hills. I beheld all the grassroots amateur fireworks in the valley. Pretty lights with additional pretty lights blossoming over it, and then quickly passing away. Maybe Buddhists could get into fireworks as emblematic of the ephemerality of all things. And you know, Independence Day as it is practiced is much more strongly focused on the love of fireworks and alcohol than on beligerent nationalism. Maybe after the revolution, these people will still shoot off fireworks on the fourth of July. It could be renamed “Fireworks Day”. And independence would be a direct, palpable experience lived every day.

I saw some graffiti that said, “stop the fear machine.” On a sidewalk the other day, I saw a child had written in magenta chalk, “FREE FOR ALL FREE FOR ALL FREE FOR ALL”.

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