Fourth

The first major memory I have of the 4th of July was a doozy: the bicentennial, in 1976, fifty years ago to the day. Although I’d lived in New York as a toddler, my memories of the place were scant (although I realized, the day that my family emigrated to the US on a sullen March morning in 1978, that I HAD actually remembered something significant: as we drove from JFK on the Van Wyk, I was amazed to see the Unisphere from the 1964 Worlds Fair out the window of the station wagon—this was an image I’d carried in my head for my entire childhood without knowing where it came from, and suddenly, on day one in America, there it was. I asked my mother if I’d ever been there and she laughed and said we’d gone there when I was a toddler! Yes, that’s me, age 3, in my father’s arms, below!)

The bicentennial was huge. We were still living in South Africa, so everything we knew about it was filtered through mainly print and radio media, although television had been introduced to South Africa earlier in the year (that’s right: SA didn’t get TV until 1976!) My folks didn’t buy a TV set until later that year, and in any event the news was pure propaganda and I can’t imagine that America’s bicentennial would have warranted more than 90 seconds of coverage.

So my experience of the bicentennial was entirely remote, yet it was incredibly thrilling and inspiring. Those huge sailships in New York Harbor! The patriotic ballyhoo slipped into our mailbox weekly (thanks Time Magazine)! The huge celebratory self-importance, the egotistical bloat of it, yet the majesty of the idea that this was, at the root of it, all ABOUT an idea. Democracy, liberty, shining cities on hills. I bought it all.

All of this was somehow strangely cemented by the raid on Entebbe. In case you don’t remember (or were too young, or not yet born): “the Palestinians” had hijacked an Air France plane with 248 passengers aboard, and diverted it to Entebbe, in Uganda. The local dictator, Idi Amin, provided support for the hijackers. On the 4th of July, Israeli commandos flew 2,000 miles to Entebbe and rescued most of the passengers, killing a swarm of Ugandan soldiers (and the hijackers) in the process. An interesting footnote: only one Israeli commando died in the mission. He was the commander of the mission, and his name was Jonathan Netanyahu. He had a younger brother, Benjamin.

To my 14 year old mind these events were inextricably linked. Somehow the rescue of the innocent passengers by the brave Israelis from the cruel and vicious Palestinians was a birthday gift from the Israelis to the Americans on their special day, a reminder of the clarion call of blah blah blah. I DID mention that I was fourteen, right?

So let’s do a massive fast forward to…well, to right this very minute. I’m sitting in my cozy chair in the living room of my cozy house in the cozy village of Montague, MA, with the minisplit protecting me from a withering heatwave. Cozy. I look out my window and there it is, the flag, the American flag, hung by the village from a flagpole out on the street in front of my house. It’s such an American thing, this hanging of the flag for months on end, every fifty yards or so on the main streets of small towns. Yes, that’s the photo at the beginning of this Substack, THEIR flag outside MY house THIS very morning.

I wish I felt like it was MY flag. My neighbor over the road, Bruce Watson, is a renowned historian and writer who vehemently feels that we should be reclaiming the flag from the right wing, which seems to have successfully turned it into a symbol of their fascism. Even, that is, as they’ve come up with new versions of the flag, the one with the black stripes, for example.

So when I look at the flag these days, I’m not seeing liberty and aspiration. I’m seeing insecurity and xenophobia. The bicentennial DID feel like a moment of unity, from the safe vantage point of half a century later. The Vietnam war had ended. Watergate was over. New beginnings! Optimism! America resurgent! Now: I’m disheartened. Has American crested? Are we fading? And maybe, if we are, that’s not such a bad thing—at least not for the rest of the world. We’ve been given enormous opportunities to make a difference. We're a nation of boundless creativity and inventiveness. We enjoy enormous prosperity (which we distribute in grotesquely unfair ways). Somehow we’re squandering it all, though, and maybe that’s what we, the sesquicentennial generation, will be remembered for.

Anyone up for a burger?