Nothing screams America like explosions in the sky. Friday. $4 Coors Light, a beautiful night, a nice walk down to see some fireworks. But then Toby Keith had to go and ruin it.
Maddy and I were standing in this “beer garden” cordoned off by orange temporary construction fencing. We had walked down to this carnival for something to do, on a whim after I passed a sign for it heading home from work. Like I said, cheap domestic was running $4, and a craft option was $5. A Ferris wheel spun lazily in place and AC/DC competed for our attention in the background through a loudspeaker. We got there twenty minutes ahead of fireworks kickoff, and kids ran around shrieking and laughing, and older kids maneuvered the crowd deftly en route to some desperate adolescent fantasy. The whole thing was like something out of a John Prine song.
“I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl / ‘cause this old man is goin’ to town…”
I stopped giving a fuck about the 4th of July around the age of twelve. I don’t say this to be edgy, and it certainly isn’t special. I would hazard a guess that sitting by the water drinking or watching fireworks isn’t a patriotic activity for most of our generation anyway—or at least the sector of it I call my friends.
Things are so bad that any attempt at patriotism is almost quaint at best and downright embarrassing at worst. I’m sure for those in the know, it’s always felt that way—post WWII, our track record is not good, to say the least, whether you’re looking at McCarthyist witch hunts at home, CIA coups abroad, illegal wars in places like Laos, or transparent evil fuck ups like Vietnam or the invasion of Iraq. Especially now, as the Supreme Court erodes the power of its own government to regulate big business and turns the presidency into a pseudo-kingship with impunity, and we sanction a genocide in Gaza, there’s virtually nothing to feel good about in terms of America’s place in the world.
When peak COVID shut down the privileged world, people seemed to become more generally aware, to that point virginal initiates to a culture war that the terminally online are long familiar with. I’m not sure if people were so insulated by privilege that until 2020 they just didn’t care, or if the monotony of full-time work just sapped any energy they might have reserved for civic engagement. Either way, when lots of privileged service workers were home, watching the apocalypse live on CNN, political slacktivism and public statements of virtue became much more hegemonic. And ever since, I think everything has just gotten worse– not because more people are engaged in the conversation, but just as a simultaneous consequence of time progressing.
Talking to people, you get a sense they’re jaded. Or tired. Or angry. Or a kaleidoscopic combination of a range of negative emotions re: the whole America/American thing– a combination that takes on a new unique quality every day depending on the specific given flavor of a day’s bad news.
Basically, it’s a weird time to watch fireworks to begin with. And then, as the first booms sizzle above, a song like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (The Angry American)” comes on, and what began for me as a tepid discomfort with a public display of patriotism, even a watered-down symbolic one, turned into a visceral anger and shame.
If you haven’t heard it, I envy you. Note that I haven’t even linked it above, as I typically do when I mention a song. I’ve heard it plenty of times, on long car rides as a kid, the whole cabin swirling with Marlboro smoke and road rage, my sister on my left with the good sense to block it out with a Walkman and headphones while I shook in the burnt orange of the highway lights and got carsick. Even if the song didn’t have those associations for me, I would still fucking hate it, but as always the personal and the political intersect.
Circumstances surrounding the song: America gets attacked by a group of Saudi hijackers in 2001. Mediocre country artist writes jingoistic anthem about how we’ll “put a boot in your ass” because “it’s the American way” and releases it in 2002. Swept up in a tide of ignorant, reactionary, xenophobic right-wing hawkism, the song gets popular and we go to war in 2003. We justify invading a country by blaming them for an attack they had nothing to do with, kill a bunch of their civilians, create fertile conditions for terror groups like ISIS, and destabilize the general region as a whole. Bush gets a second term and the FCC doesn’t give a shit that “news” is funded by advertising, so dumber and dumber and dumber and more reactionary takes generate more controversy so more people tune in, and the worst people on the planet get rich on the suffering of people a world away, and then claim they care about veterans while they endorse slashing their benefits and get excited about fireworks that ignite PTSD symptoms and scare dogs. Oh, and Twitter comes to be, and makes us all dumber still.
If I have to relitigate the Iraq War and how much of a disaster it was, you shouldn’t be reading this. And luckily I’m not running for office, so if you disagree with me, fuck you.
Sorry. Toby Keith pisses me off. Come back. It’s alright. Let’s talk it out.
So we’re watching fireworks, and this song comes on. There’s all these bullshit lines like “a mighty sucker punch came flyin’ in from somewhere in the back / soon as we could see clearly through our big black eye / man, we lit up your world / like the Fourth of July” (emphasis mine).
The whole thing just makes me angry, because here we stand in a small Connecticut town on a beautiful night, while portable generators suck electricity for us to have our fun, and all around we celebrate a decaying country by consuming. All of these, of course, are things that I was successfully putting aside until that bullshit song pulled the moment into focus.
We should have all been ashamed of ourselves, listening to those lyrics while pretty colors exploded in the sky, at a time when we still enable and embolden an ally to destroy a region and its people, and our choices for our upcoming November are Orange Mussolini and an incumbent president who can’t stay awake for primetime. I don’t want to vote, and in conversations with friends recently it has been emphasized how much fight and sacrifice people go through across the world to be given the right to vote, and here my privileged sanctimonious ass sits not wanting to take advantage of that right. I know which one I’ll never vote for. I’m still building up the stomach to hold my breath and vote for the other one. I guess I have a few months to get it together.
In the meantime.
The song, written for pop-country radio play, ends mercifully after just three and a half minutes, roughly.
Then, what comes on? “Born in the U.S.A.” by none other than the subject matter of June 18‘s performative journal, Bruce Springsteen. I thought I might have a stroke, and finally abandon this plane for a different one, from the sheer absurdity of what I was hearing. I don’t have the time, energy, desire, necessity, or chutzpah to explain to you why “Born in the U.S.A.” is not a patriotic song. Read the lyrics and get back to me. But you know whoever was playing it either thought it was at least adjacently patriotic, or they were playing a cruel joke designed to kill any brain cells of mine still successfully evading the destructive wrath of the $4 Coors slowly warming in my right hand, that amber liquid that perennially explodes neurons in colorful fireworks displays in my skull.
*
The temperature of the air was perfect. Ash didn’t fall in my beer until I was already basically done with it. I was with the love of my life and happiness all around kept trying to enter me through a kind of spiritual osmosis. I was still disgusted, but managing fine, sitting there thinking about how much better I was for seeing through all of it. But really, I’m all the same. I was buying, I was consuming, I didn’t make a fuss. My self-righteousness functioned solely to absolve me of my own guilt, because even if I felt powerless to enact any sort of change, at least I knew the score, could point the finger, could pass on the blame. And I don’t blame myself for the world’s problems, either, but that’s the thing with systemic problems: they go beyond you and me. You can’t blame any one person, and blaming all of us is the same as blaming no one. But I guess if you can’t blame anyone, we’re all to blame.
There’s no one accountable, and things certainly aren’t getting better from the top down.
I know this is a rambling one, but I think Toby Keith broke my brain. And as we tiptoe toward the Fourth and wait for more headlines about what shitty thing the Supreme Court is doing, how bad the situation is in Gaza, or anything election related, I find myself just feeling bad. Simultaneously, I know sinking into my learned helplessness and doomerism serves only to empower the worst people in the world. But what do we do?
I held Maddy’s hand and typed furious notes on my phone with the other, the scaffolding for what is slowly becoming a more and more disjointed and confused piece, and writing out this scene now, I wonder what untellable horrors were visited upon vulnerable people a world away just to ensure the stupid device in my hand that only upsets me has some rare earth metal powering its battery. My blood diamond, my cursed ring, my iPhone.
Abundant consumption in a world of manufactured scarcity. Brought to you courtesy of the Red White and Blue.
addendum: july 16, 2024
When I wrote this piece, no one had shot Trump yet. That someone now has done so semi successfully certainly hangs over this piece like a ghost. My thoughts on it aren’t particularly unique and yet to express them would warrant another piece entirely, and I won’t do that to you, dear reader. At least not today. All I’ll offer is that it seems like things are just going to keep getting weirder, and in the face of my growing dread and fear, I’m leaning on curiosity to shepherd me into the future. I don’t know what’s coming, but I promise to meet whatever it is with my eyes open, until they close for good.
matt nilsen 