Explosives and more: What the Fourth of July stands for now

We can still celebrate America in the Trump era, but let's be clear about what we're celebrating.

It’s a sadly fitting comment on the state of our nearly 249-year-old union that a number of Fourth of July celebrations in and around Los Angeles, mostly in heavily Latino areas, have been canceled out of fear that they would become the next soft target for the Trump administration’s crackdown on certain immigrants. It raises a question for those of us still fortunate enough to be able to saunter out of our homes and head to the nearest non-canceled Independence Day concert, parade or Hoagie giveaway: What exactly are we celebrating?

Democracy, the animating idea of our original founding document, has become an inconvenience to be menaced by what is now state-sanctioned violence. The regime is trampling the plainest language of the Constitution while supposedly coequal branches of government stand back and stand by. Immigration, trade and science, once widely considered American strengths, have become objects of official hatred and derision.

What’s left? Less, sure, but not nothing. Other perhaps less appealing but nevertheless time-honored aspects of the American character abide. To wit:

Pyromania: John Adams predicted the “Second Day of July 1776” would be forever celebrated with, among other things, “Bonfires and Illuminations.” He got the date wrong but the pyrotechnics right: I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get a flu vaccine this fall, but I can certainly acquire dangerous Fourth of July explosives in any one of countless California parking lots this summer. The incendiary patriotism of the season was only heightened by Donald Trump’s unilateral recent decision to order 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs dropped on another country for the first time. Talk about fireworks!

A California roadside explodes with patriotic pride.

Know-nothingism: It turns out that Adams, despite centuries of censure for his Alien and Sedition Acts, may have been prescient on that point too. In March, for the first time since World War II, the president invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, the only one of the acts still on the books, to send 137 Venezuelan immigrants to a Salvadoran gulag. Nation-of-immigrants notions aside, the current eruption of nativism draws on an American impulse that dates back through Japanese internment, Chinese exclusion and the anti-Catholic Know Nothings to the early days of the republic.

Nationalism: Last month, after pausing to publicly ascertain the immigration status of those erecting a pair of nine-story flagpoles at the White House, Trump hailed the spires as both “magnificent” and “rust-proof.” His followers, meanwhile, keep coming up with innovative ways to fly the flag: upside-down, in fun new colors, as a weapon, Confederate. As long as it’s not Mexican!

Manifest destiny: Many of us may have been under the impression that we gave up on European-style empire after the Spanish-American War and ran out of continent to conquer before that, but perhaps we weren’t thinking rapaciously enough. With the president now sizing up territory from Canada to Panama and Greenland to Gaza, U.S. expansionism is alive and well.

Conspiracy theories: From grassy-knoll hypotheses of the John F. Kennedy assassination to QAnon prophecies of a John F. Kennedy Jr. resurrection to the parasitic lunacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., what has been famously dubbed the “paranoid style” of American politics never goes out of style. You might disagree, but then again, you might think Joe Biden was swapped out for an android soon after he lost the 2020 election.

Plutocracy: If all goes as poorly as expected in Washington this week, the president will mark the holiday by signing legislation to provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the rich at the expense of medical care and food assistance for the poor. This is just a few months after he hired the world’s richest man to demolish our chief foreign aid agency, dooming legions of vulnerable people across the globe to illness and death in the name of “efficiency.” And in case anyone missed these broad hints that we live in a second Gilded Age, Trump re-renamed the nation’s highest peak after William McKinley and had the Oval Office grotesquely filigreed in gold.

Optimism: A decade of Trump promising to rescue our country from the brink of ruin — even as his opponents insist he will push us over — has been hard on Americans’ famously sunny dispositions. And yet rising pessimism about the country’s future hasn’t completely dampened our obdurate optimism about our individual and to some extent collective prospects: Consider that most Americans looking ahead to this administration expected the economy to improve. Maybe our predilection for such audacious — not to say unmoored — hope led too many to underestimate the danger of returning an underqualified, anti-democratic demagogue to office. Under the circumstances, though, we will need all the lingering optimism we can muster to make it through. It’s in that spirit that I wish you the happiest possible Fourth of July!