WE HAD A REVOLUTION

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I subscribe to TomDispatch, Tom Engelhart’s political webzine sponsored by The Nation magazine. In honor of the Fourth of July, he quoted some parts of the Declaration of Independence that sound eerily like the present:

By the way, if you have a moment on the Fourth, check out the Declaration of Independence for a glimpse of the bad old days when Americans were ruled by a King George, who, as the document's authors made clear, refused "his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good," "affected to render the Military

independent of and superior to the Civil Power," and "transport[ed] us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences."

I sent him an email:

Dear Tom

In Inverness, California, a miniscule town on Tomales Bay, the reading aloud, with heartfelt cheering, of the Declaration of Independence is part of every Fourth of July celebration, along with sack races, etc.

Nancy

Besides the sack races, there were three-legged races and a toddler race (very short, with mom at the finish line) for the kids, and for the older folks, a walking “race” to the bar down by the bay.

The Fourth from my childhood that impressed me was also a daytime visit so I didn’t see fireworks there either. We were visiting my parents’ friends Ernie and Katy Moross in Goldfield, Nevada and went over to Tonopah to see the parade. It was just a small-town parade, kind of home-made, and that’s what I liked about it. Like the Inverness celebration it seemed to embody what the Fourth is all about.

Independence: I was in Medimont, Idaho (pop. 11) on the Fourth of July one year, visiting my parents’ friends the Hansons. Too small for a parade OR fireworks. We just stuck some sparklers in the lawn and lit them. We had home-made berry pie Ruth Hanson made from hand-picked wild berries. The Hansons farmed in the summer, trapped in the fall, and visited their kids (friends of mine) in San Francisco in the winter. We went trout-fishing. I wandered down by the lake to pick feral asparagus and eat it raw. The lake was clear blue, but to keep it that way they had to thread the river through it in a channel with levees on each side. The river was full of chemicals from the copper mines up in the hills and it was bubble-gum blue-green. Irv Hanson told me a story. The house had needed a new roof. Irv had seen a good cedar log up in the hills, but it was in a place he just couldn’t get it out of. Then a spring flood worked it loose, he snaked it out and cut it up, made shingles, and nailed on his new roof. Malvina wrote a song about the Hansons. She never recorded it, and the book it’s in is out of print, but you can find the lyrics for “Down to Hansons’” on the web.

My mother wrote poems as well as songs. Here’s one I emailed to some friends two years ago on the Fourth. I don't know when she wrote it, but it was printed in her songbook The Muse of Parker Street: More Songs by Malvina Reynolds, which came out in 1967.

STOCKTAKING

We've landed in a very strange confusion

Who once commanded all the world's attention

For something that I hardly dare to mention--

We had a revolution.

From books I read I gather the impression

We headed up the world in proper manner,

The Bill of Rights our fair and shining banner--

But now we're at the tail of the procession.

We coax informers from the ditch and stable

And they become our twentieth century heroes

And purse-mad fools and diplomatic zeros

Become our voices at the council table.

Freedoms we won are laid by on deposit,

The horror picture book becomes our culture,

Our symbol is the new atomic vulture,

And liberty's the skeleton in the closet.

We've landed in some very strange confusions,

Who once had universal admiration,

Now we appear, a proud and giant nation,

Bound, gagged and led by our own Lilliputians.

I wrote a limerick for the Word-a-Day gang that also seems appropriate to the day:

Rip Van Winkle (rip van WING-kuhl) noun

One who fails to keep up with the times.

[After Rip Van Winkle, a character in a story by Washington Irving (1783-1859). Rip falls asleep for 20 years in the Catskill mountains and wakes up to discover the world around him has changed. He finds that the American Revolutionary war has taken place and instead of being a subject of His Majesty George the Third, he is now a free citizen of the United States.]

They say that enough of strong drink’ll

Cause slumbering like RIP VAN WINKLE

But the drinking of beer

Won’t do it, I fear,

'Cause you’d have to get up to tinkle.

Old Rip slept right through our rebellion

‘Stead of fighting like any young hellion.

He bowled and he boozed,

And woke up confused

And then had to go read Trevelyan.*

*British historian of the American Revolution