Happy Fourth of July, everyone!
I hope your day is full of good food, better company, and whatever version of rest you've earned this year.
My piece on Substack for today, The Case for Retiring Fireworks.
Historian John Meecham on current stated claims from the White House toward nationalized elections:
The Constitution, the Framers did this for a reason. They didn't want nationalized elections. They wanted...remember, the key insight of the American founding is that most of what we would want to do as human beings is wrong. Most of it's selfish...that's the insight. The reason it's so hard to get anything done in this country is because they assume that most of what we would want to do would be wrong. And so elections, moving to the states, that was part of this. I was pleased that the Republican Party is pushing back on that... - Firing Line S10E1
He also said: Patriotism and nationalism. We're in a nationalistic season. Right? Allegiance to your own kind. Patriotism (George Orwel did a great essay on this), patriotism, is allegiance to an idea.
I'll say that again: Nationalism is allegiance to oneself. One's own group. One's own party.
That is not America. Not after the second birthing of America after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Period. We're living in America 2.0 But we're now headed into our 3rd birthing, America 3.0. We're about to revile ourselves against those in power, their ideals, to rebuild once again the nature of our better Angels, as Pres. Lincoln said.
Since it's the holiday, I want to spend today's special post somewhere a little different than usual, not on the news cycle, but on an old post of mine from 2012 called "American Sins."
I wrote it back when nobody took blogs seriously, myself included, so it's raw and not deeply edited. But going back through it this week, three parts of it held up better than I expected, and on a day about what this country is supposed to be, it felt worth revisiting what I was already trying to say fourteen years ago.
That piece got into Citizens United, the 47%, Romney, taxes, a CenturyLink outage that kept me offline for a day.
Fourteen years later, those three parts still hold up.
The subsistence argument.
The piece asked why we talk about tax rates as percentages instead of asking what those percentages actually cost a person. A third of a poor family's income is food and rent. A third of a rich person's income is nothing they'll ever notice. Same number, completely different sacrifice. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, marginal utility of money, effective burden versus nominal rate, but the instinct was right and it's still right.
The loudspeaker line.
Writing about Citizens United and money as speech, I landed on this:
"If money is free speech to say Donald Trump, then by comparison he is speaking with a loudspeaker and I am speaking with a pillow over my face." WE are speaking with pillows over our faces, now more than ever.
That's the one line from the whole piece that has come back around to bite us in ways never expected.
The infrastructure question.
I was annoyed that CenturyLink (I have Quantum Fiber now, having dumped Comcast entirely) had left me offline for twelve hours with no explanation, and I asked why our internet doesn't have the same redundancy the actual internet protocol was designed to have, the same way our roads are free so people can go buy things.
That question turned out to be the net neutrality fight and the municipal broadband fight of the following decade.
The piece ended with a call to action:
"Start being Americans again, start being Heroes."
Calling to raise the standard of living for every American citizen. Simple as that sounds, it was the same point as the tax argument above it, just stated as a demand instead of an analysis.
I still believe it.
Fair trade, honestly. Few were watching back then, and that's probably also why the good parts, the loudspeaker line, the subsistence argument, the infrastructure question, never got sanded down either.
I bring this up now for a reason.
I wasn't trying to be prophetic in 2012, I was just annoyed and paying attention. But look at where those threads led.
Citizens United didn't stay theoretical.
That loudspeaker got louder.
The subsistence gap has gotten wider.
None of what's happened since was hard to see coming if you were watching in 2012, it just took longer than I expected.
Today is the Fourth. Our Fourth. Not one person's, not one Party's.
I still believe we can do better than this. It looks like it will be soon.
If two years is soon...28 months.
And that's the whole reason for putting the old post up today.
"It scares me when people aren't brave enough to face their own history." - Lonnie G. Bunch III, Sec. of the Smithsonian Institution
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.
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