WHO WE ARE-We must be doing something right to last 238 years and still believe in the myths that the Founding Fathers believed with all their heart and soul … the ideal that all men were created equal and all had the absolute right to their lives, their liberty and their personal pursuit of happiness.
Those words are so deeply embedded in my consciousness, in my neurological DNA, that even in dementia I’m certain I would recite them at the slightest prompting.
Needless to say, they didn’t really mean them except for the part about “all men” because women were not fully included to be sure. Nor were African-Americans who were enslaved. Nor were the native populations who were relegated to open air concentration camps if they were compliant enough.
It was a purely political document, nothing more, intended to attract the masses to support for a movement run by the new breed of colonial oligarchs.
It has been a thing of beauty that the hundreds of millions of us who came later have tried to breathe life into, to achieve our own freedom and in some cases the freedom of others.
Myths are the problem. The fact that our American idealism is fantasy.
We need to go back to the beginning and learn how wide the gap was between the aspirations of people who put their lives and their sacred fortunes on the line to found a new nation and real-life motives they shared that were as much selfish as idealistic motives.
Paul Revere didn’t ride alone those 13 miles to sound the alarm, “The British are coming, the British are coming….” Two other guys were riding with him those two hours.
As comedian Robert Wuhl pointed out in his brilliant “Assume the Position” college class videos a few years ago, the guy who really sounded the alarm was mailman Israel Bissell who rode more than 300 miles across state lines. But Longfellow would never have been able to pull off his famous poem written in 1860 with a name like Bissell:
‘Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Israel Bissell …?’
Look at the First Amendment, all that stuff about freedom of speech and religion and of the press.
It was so much claptrap to our second President John Adams. He had the compliant Congress adopt the Alien and Sedition Act which was used to incarcerate his political opponents, including the nation’s first great drunken muckraker journalist, James Thompson Callender. Callender had exposed Adams’ buddy, Alexander Hamilton, who used his powers over the purse as Treasurer to enrich himself in a pay-to-play scheme that included enjoying the pleasures of his partner-in-crime’s wife.
Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia slave owner who so fervently believed in the natural rights of man, was so appalled he secretly put Callender on the payroll and published all his articles widely. Their friendship deteriorated once Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800 in the most vicious presidential campaign in history.
It was Callender who revealed Jefferson’s slave wife Sally Hemings had borne him children, a truth that was squelched far and wide until DNA tests 20 years ago proved the muckraker right, a matter of little consolation since shortly after his expose Callender was found drowned in shallow water in a river not far from Monticello.
To quote the moral teaching of Robert Wuhl: “The key to history is who tells the story … When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
And, the Independence Day lesson for this town, where we are all swept away in the dreamland of the Disneyland Mind, is … we have to begin to be able to discern the difference between what is real and what is not.
It isn’t easy. Those who own the system, who own the media, who own the means of productive lives are quite content with the way things are working; they are getting richer and more powerful, and everybody else is getting poorer and more afraid.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
This is a country with transcendent ideals written into our land and water, our very beings.
The truest words JFK uttered were about the fight for freedom, a “twilight struggle,” he called it, a journey that never ends.
We all need to ask ourselves whether we are really engaged in that struggle or just patting our egos on the back and carrying on as always in the realm of our delusions.
(Ron Kaye is a lifetime journalist, writer and political observer. He is the former editor of the Daily News and the founder of the Saving LA Project. He writes occasionally for CityWatch and can be reached at[email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 54
Pub: Jul 4, 2014
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 54
Pub: Jul 4, 2014
