this land is my land

On a mean midsummer night at the butt-end of the 1980s, I drove down east 34th street toward a Fourth of July party. Marc, riding shotgun, tried to maintain his rep as Amarillo’s First Punk by leaning out of the passenger window of my car and shooting off Roman candles as we drove by Llano Cemetery. Billy, a self-styled Zen Buddhist biker, was—I believe—meditating in a lotus position as we careened wildly down the (fortunately) over-wide street. I can’t, however, be entirely sure what Billy was doing, intent as I was on trying to drive as cars swerved out-of-control in our direction, the drivers temporarily blinded by the fireworks Marc aimed directly at them.

That’s my first memory of the evening and it melts into my last. Late that night, someone burned a flag while we sang “America the Beautiful.” The mid-to-late-eighties was the first time in my memory that the perennial attempt to ban that perennial straw man of flag-burning surfaced. Five hours away and five years before our Independence Day party, Gregory Johnson had burned an American flag in front of Dallas City Hall as an act of protest against the Republican National Convention. Johnson was arrested and eventually convicted with desecration of a venerated object. In 1988, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Johnson’s conviction, and the Supreme Court eventually upheld the decision that burning the flag was a form of free speech.

So it was that I and the witches-brew of American kids I hung with—old-school punks, embryonic Goths, and fading wave-o’s looking for a new look—found ourselves burning an American flag while singing the song that should be the National Anthem. We did it because we were young, and because we could, and because someone was telling us not to.

It was a silly and childish act, a fact instantly recognized by the girl with the unnaturally black pageboy haircut, who wandered by, and rolling her eyes, condescendingly pointed out that everyone was burning flags that year. Which perhaps only served to prove the point that we didn’t know we were making: it wasn’t even an issue, until someone said someone couldn’t do it.

It was a silly and childish act, as is all political theatre, but I’m not going to apologize for it. And I’m thinking of that action tonight, as the S.O.’s brother and his girlfriend drive away from the southside neighborhood where we are celebrating. They are going to the officially-sanctioned city fireworks, and I barely have time to shake their hands as I teach my son to shoot the unofficial kind in open defiance of the city’s ban of such displays of patriotism. I enjoy the experience of being surrounding by explosions—the professional fireworks, as well as the unprofessional ones exploding on the horizon or in the street.

Especially in the street.

Most of all, I enjoy the hubris of it all—at the old Thompson Park displays people used to monkeywrench the official display by shooting cheap bottle rockets into the middle of an expensively overproduced exploding red-white-and-blue star. And, then, of course, there were always the obnoxious kids, throwing Black Cats right at your feet when you weren’t watching.

There are, of course, very good reasons for cities to ban fireworks—particularly this city. A mesquite weed will burst into flames if you look at it angrily, so it’s generally a good idea to have as few things openly burning as possible in this dry deathscape.

But there are also very good reasons for ordinary citizens to openly and joyously defy the ban—particularly on the Fourth of July, particularly on Independence Day.

It’s political theatre. Like the Boston Tea Party, when the Sons of Liberty dressed in silly, unconvincing Mohawk costumes, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and childishly dumped the ships’ cargo of English tea into the sea. Or like Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies who, in 1967, childishly dumped paper money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Or like our silly and childish flag-burning.

Sometimes, just as children frequently possess a simple wisdom that adults cannot duplicate, so childish acts can point out deeper truths.

The universal truth is this: democracy is founded—and only can be founded—through the rebellion of ordinary people against unjust laws. Anniversaries of births of democracies should be celebrated in like manner.

We’ll light our fireworks wherever we want. There are almost a couple of hundred thousand people in this city. They can’t put all of us in jail.

And, in these ugly days of USA-PATRIOT acts and the President saying, “You’re either with us or against us,” such displays shouldn’t stop on the Fourth.

Independence Day, 2005, is over, but we need to keep acting like children spoiled by democracy.

Check out books from the library that are guaranteed to raise eyebrows. Dig out your copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook from the bottom of your box of high school memorabilia. Read it on an airplane. Visit questionable Internet sites. Wear t-shirts with inflammatory slogans. Burn the flag to save what it represents. Refuse to stay in the “free-speech zone.” Insist that everywhere is a free-speech zone.

Because America, patriotism, democracy demands no less.

SPACEDARK