'Our Native Bumptiousness and Ebulliation'

The best thing about Independence Day in the United States is that no one is obligated to observe it. And if you do, regardless of how eccentrically or offensively, that’s your business. Don’t impose your protest or drunken shenanigans on me or my family but otherwise you have carte blanche to express your patriotism, or its absence, as you wish. That’s what “the freedom of speech” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” mean, according to the First Amendment of our Constitution.

 For much of my life, the Fourth of July started with a parade. While living in upstate New York, that meant driving to Pittsfield, Mass., for its annual Fourth of July Parade, a tradition that started in 1801, just twenty-five years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. One year I watched a rather ample-figured U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy amble behind the American Legion band and glad-hand the crowd. A year later I stood on the sidewalk beside the singer Michael McDonald, chatting and cheering.

I rather dimly recall the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. I was living on the margin and drinking. I remember throwing firecrackers from the roof of someone’s garage. I don’t remember feeling much patriotism or much pain. In the September 1973 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the American poet L.E. Sissman published “The B.S. Bicentennial.”

“Given the kinds and numbers of problems our country has faced and flubbed over the last decade or two,” Sissman writes, “one might think that the forthcoming jubilee would be subdued, retrospective, elegiac, maybe even prayerful. Given our native bumptiousness and ebulliation, though, one might be certain that the party would be big, noisy, brash, and pointless.”

Never underestimate the genius of what Tom Wolfe celebrates as “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours.”  

Sissman was reacting not to the 200^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence but to the marketing and public relations industry already hyping the Bicentennial. He’s writing on the Fourth of July in 1973, and Watergate is monopolizing the front page. When finishing his column, Sissman tells us he plans to attend the Independence Day festivities of the town where he lives.

“I can hear the sirens of the volunteer fire department now,” he writes. “There’ll be a parade of fire trucks . . . a drum-and-bugle corps, a scattering of veterans in costumes of assorted wars, some more illicit cannon crackers and salutes, a League of Women Voters’ flea market, and a bright-red hot dog with bright-yellow ball-park mustard for me to eat and a bottle of cheap, but good, Genesee beer to drink.”

In other words, an old-fashioned American shindig. He adds: “Just moyen-apathétique eating, guzzling, watching, and generally enjoying themselves.”

[Sissman’s essay is collected in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the Seventies (Vanguard, 1975).]