Independence Day

[RainDog]

http://miniver.blogspot.com/2011/07/independence-day.html

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite, with my soft spot for lefty activism) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

I've posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence. The nation was born not when people used force of arms to secure the nation, either for the first time or the last time. Rather the nation was born when the idea of the nation was first named clearly.

It's easy to forget what a rhetorical achievement the Declaration really is. The world of 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.

...more at the link

This nation deserves praise for deciding to be a political structure formed by law, rather than by "men."

I would say "humans," but the reality is that, even at that time, those who were granted rights by this agreement to provide law, with checks and balances, to hold power were not women, nor men of color. But that moment was the beginning of an idea, not the end of it.

Since then, we have, by law, extended the idea of human rights beyond property-owning white men. We're a better nation for that.

Our next task, as enlightened citizens, is to destroy the idea of the divine right of capital. We were able to think beyond "the divine right of kings" and all the propaganda that upheld that idea within religious, social and political institutions. But we've not yet learned to overcome the propaganda that capital deserves the power it takes from those who are, by birth or by immigration, part of the contract this nation made with humankind so many years ago.

Here's to the next stage of the American Revolution.