REGRETS ONLY

I need to interrupt my Substack vacation to dash off a quick note….

Dear U.S.A.,

Thanks so much for inviting me to your party on July 4th. At my age I don’t get many invitations like this, and certainly never one for a big 250. Sounds like you have a great day planned, with parades, Declaration of Independence readings, flyovers by our latest weaponry, men fighting in cages, and flags—lots and lots of flags.

I could trot out a semi-plausible excuse for not attending…I know it’s still weeks away but my throat’s feeling scratchy. Would love to but a man’s coming to spray our lawn for ticks…but there are already enough lies infecting this country, and so rather than beg off with a tiny white one, I’ll respect you with the absolute truth.

It’s all about your behavior, America, not just over the course of the past 250 years, but the last ten months. Not to mince words, I find it reprehensible. An abbreviated list of wrongdoing would include sneak-attacking (twice!) a la Pearl Harbor a country we were ostensible at peace with, tearing up the Voting Rights act that was the greatest legacy of the Civil Rights movement and Dr. King, proposing a “compensation” fund for January 6 cop killers and insurrectionists, desecrating our capital with a faux grandiose ugliness that is absurdly Mussolini-esque.

Worst of all, you’ve elected (twice!) a mentally deranged sociopath, an evil clown, who is not only the worst president in our history, but easily the cruelest, most despicable American who ever lived.

Party with you after acting like that? Go through the bother of memorizing the word semiquincentennial? Nah, don’t think so.

I can anticipate your reaction. Only the most misanthropic unpatriotic sour senescent ungrateful defeatist party-pooping s.o.b. would deliberately duck such a grand occasion. Why should we let our celebration be co-opted by the bad guys, not use it to re-dedicate ourselves to our founding verities, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Why not, for that matter, use July Fourth as the opening pep rally in winning back the House?

I understand this argument, but I don’t buy into it. American democracy is wounded, likely mortally, and no parades, no patriotic speeches, can mask this basic fact; we could limp on for another hundred years as a country and never get over the shame of the last decade.

Another reason for my non-attendance. While I haven’t seen the guest list, I’m guessing there will be lots of celebrity American historians there, and that’s a crowd I’d just as soon avoid. Jon Meacham, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Joseph J. Ellis et al. For too many years they’ve written about you with far too much respect, pretending to be honest about your flaws while very smugly implying you remain a wonderful country deserving the brightest, most exceptional of futures.

Wrong.

All it took in the American “experiment” was for one charlatan, one lunatic, to come along, seize power with his billionaire cronies, and the whole elaborately constructed contraption came down in flames over our heads. Explain that if you can.

I’ll avoid the comedians, too. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and the boys, though I’m sure they’ll be the life of the party. Satirists always take the moral high ground when challenged, but they’ve done much to normalize this horror show, and come perilously close to being our president’s enablers. They made bitter fun of him his first term and what happened? Second term!

Probably pundits will be partying, too. They’ll get handsomely paid for telling us what America truly means, on the left and right both, and I’m just not in the mood for their yammering.

Another reason for not coming is that I’ve been burned before. Does anyone remember Bicentennial 1976? I attended, and trust me—it wasn’t very jolly. The Watergate hangover year, and no one was in the mood to party. I remember something called the “Freedom Train” choo-chooing around the county instilling patriotic ardor in the rubes, but other than that my memory is blank. I don’t think the subsequent 50 years have added much in the way of fun, and even fireworks have been replaced now by laser shows, which, take it from the kid in me, aren’t half as spectacular.

So I’ll be staying home on the Fourth, picking blueberries from our patch, drinking ice tea in the shade, plotting a trip to some country where free people can still breathe. I will of course be proudly flying a flag from our deck—the Greenland flag.

And—oh yes. Though I’m a passionate soccer fan, don’t bother inviting me to the World Corrupt Cup either.

I’ll finish this RSVP, Mr. and Mrs. America, by asking the question that you’re probably dying to ask yourselves.

Do I hate you?

No, I don’t hate you. Against all reason, I continue to love you very much. But you’re just not someone I want to party with, ever ever ever again.