A Celebration of the Transcendent & the Sublime
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Related subjects: J.E. Robertson, Opinion, U.S. news, U.S. Politics Comments (1)
The Fourth of July is an American standard. It is a day of celebrations, of national fanfare, national idiosyncrasy, encounters with the outdoors, and the landscape and the feel of people coming together, a celebration of common experience, and of difference. It is so intimate a part of the national fabric that this particular holiday actually helps illuminate what sense of connectivity there is across the cultural spectrum that comprises American society.
It is a day of national communion but which is rooted in ideas and the joy of independence, not in chauvinistic nationalism. Essentially, we celebrate the right to have a say, to take a stand, to change what we cannot countenance, to make an honest effort at betterment of our condition and that of those around us, to disagree and to live with the knowledge that we can do so without fear of persecution. And there we see how liberty is also responsibility.
We celebrate words, and the gift and bounty of words freely accessed and dispersed in the community. As Ezra Pound put it: “The mot juste is of public utility … We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate.” We are a society of letters, rooted in text and written reasoning, ever expanding the thrash and cobbling of our ideas into a press of discovery and dissent, of aspiration and correction.
We have, as the nation’s founders envisioned, made a fabric of voices in which distinction is permitted and prized. Whether we engage with holy scripture or founding documents, statues and treaties or the poetry of progress, the tabloid cheap or the confessional biopic, we are each of us like words themselves in the great epic of individual dreaming and liberty, where we can deal with edges, with difference perceived, where difference is a positive quality and the “fragmentation” of the whole does not break it up into torn shreds but lets it go deeper into the telling of philosophical and adversarial vignettes.
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We celebrate truth and the beauty of coming near to it. The Declaration of Independence reads as follows:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…
So, we celebrate rebellion and renewal, the rebirth of basic human rights and urgings. We celebrate the right to treat noble desires as worthy of consideration, even in the least celebrated among us. These are transcendent values and sublime in their manifestation in the holiday that overtakes us, but they are the root and the style, the meaning and the mineral content of this traditional festivity. For all her flaws, for all her mistaken acts or petty departures from the undeniable ideals of her birth, the United States is a place where one can cry out criticism or dissent with free lungs and a clear conscience.
We have the power to alter the course of our history, before it is too late. This is not a revelation, not an alarm call, not an introduction to some esoteric analysis. It is the meaning of our system of laws, the meaning of the revolution that now 236 years after it was declared, we can look back on with studied inspiration. We have the power to alter the course of our history, before it is too late. There is nothing more central to the American experiment, nothing more central to the purpose of our nation. And it is fortunate that at this moment in history, we are so positioned.
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