America Not Done

Although we had watched the President speak from Mount Rushmore on Friday evening, and seen the entire fireworks show afterwards, last night, on the actual Fourth, J wanted to watch the live event that was aired from the south lawn of the White House. So we found the White House live stream on Youtube and streamed it onto the television with Chromecast.

The President covered some of the same ground in his speech. He repeated his determination to build a new statuary garden of American heroes. He had announced this in South Dakota the previous night. When he had first said this, I burst out laughing. What a genius idea! You want to take down our statues? We're going to put up more of them. 

To be honest, I thought the idea was a bit cheesy in its brilliance. You could almost sense the ambiguous confusion in the audience at Mount Rushmore after the build up to the announcement. Well ok, I guess we'll visit that in our RV once they build it. 

But so many of the President's ideas turn out to be wiser than I myself thought when I first them. It's one of the reasons I've learned to trust his judgment and his timing. The second time I heard the idea last night, it was more lucidly expressed and I suddenly was unironically enthusiastic about it, especially when I heard that Henry Clay would be one of the honorees.  

After the White House event finished in the late afternoon, J wanted to watch the Capitol Fourth of July celebration on PBS, as we have done in previous years. I hadn't given it very much attention in the past. 

This year it was quite a revealing show. I'm glad we watched it. I called it "America's Funeral" as we watched it. The message was "Happy Birthday America! Now Rest in Peace."

It was clear PBS had gone whole hog into the Slogan-of-the-Moment movement. Both feet were in the Cultural Revolution. The woman singing the national anthem, a weak-limbed progressive type without an ounce of body energy or expression, sang "The Star Spangled Banner" wearing a blazer that cowardly concealed a t-shirt with the Slogan-of-the-Moment on it. 

"The only way she'll get my respect is if she drops to a knee in the middle of the song," I said. PBS is a network of cowards, concealing their activism in soft-voiced "we're just reality unfiltered, given to you by people who care." I didn't expect otherwise, but the over-top-top America as We Know it is Dead took even me by surprise.

Part of it was the shutdown of course, which they played to their political advantage, in obvious rebuke and contrast to the President. There was no live audience---none at all. The new leftist dogma as of this week is that the virus is so dangerous that, unless we're rioting and protesting for good causes, which somehow are healthy, we must all stay locked down away and apart from each other for the foreseeable future, our expressions masked from each other's view to avoid conveyance of any humanity. Above all, we must all obey the things being told us. We must be forced to do them, as only the things we are forced to do will matter in the end. Even a tiny live audience wearing masks and sitting twenty feet apart would have undercut that message. How about a show of the production crew that has to work so the maskless celebrity can tell us the meaning of the Fourth? Yeah, right. Dream on. They're just nobodies.

It was all so... lame.  Its lifelessness reflected how weak-souled is the entire movement of the Left. Thank god we are not at an hour of history in which socialist movements are being driven by hordes of youth with pent-up sexualized energy at a time of growing birth rates and industrialism. Instead the entire Left looks like a tired machine that is running down, its batteries long exhausted, even as they think they are fresh and new. That is why everything they are doing lately is a go-for-stroke strategy before they breathe out the last breath of the long-running Establishment narrative. It is a narrative that is decades past the apex of its energy, but which has been forced out into the open, to play all its cards at once, before it was ready to do so, by the brilliance of the President.

Watching the celebrity hosts was nearly intolerable. The host was a mixed race black woman famous as a former Miss America and, at least in my memory from the Eighties, for appearing in Playboy magazine. Her co-host, who as a white man was obviously second fiddle, was a famous television actor who had been on a comedy sitcom decades ago but has been a staple of these kinds of television productions in recent years.

Up until now I had nothing against either of them. Now, watching them, all I could do was loathe them. It wasn't personal mind you. I would probably have loathed any celebrity host. Something in me has shifted, as a result of watching real non-famous people on Youtube these last few months. I can't bear to watch the stylized gestures and intonations of television actors anymore. There she was, that host, using all the power of her persona crafted so well over the years, and on-air charisma to tell me what I find as the meaning of the Fourth of July. Celebrities know we'll pay attention to them. They know they tell us what we are supposed to think and feel. Well, not anymore.

In that moment I saw her and her cohost in all their ugliness, as if makeup concealing grotesque hideous features was melting off on camera without them being aware of it. The mechanisms of her skillful influence were laid bare. 

They had always been there, of course, and the realization of this was perhaps the most horrifying of all, as I had thought I had been consciously aware of all this for decades, and thought I had seen it clearly before, and could filter it out. But until that moment last night I had never been truly disgusted by it to that level, as if I were vomiting up poison that someone was trying to feed me. I can never go back--ever. We are living the last days of Pop Culture. Even the America they think they are dismantling is really only the Pop Culture version of America and its history that exists within Pop Culture. 

Much of the broadcast consisted of snippets of taped performances from previous years---much footage of white people in the audience clapping for black performers.  Other musical performances had been newly taped for this year to give some new content. These performances were especially wretched and barely appropriate. They were little more than boring music videos, as if meant to say don't the idea that we'll be celebrating this holiday much anymore. Only black performers were allowed to sing anything vaguely evocative of the Fourth, or with any traditional American iconography.  In the only reference to 1776 in the entire evening, a famous black female singer stood in front of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and starting crooning a soulful version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." 

"Huh? What's the idea? Sure I like the song, but what does it have to do with the Declaration of Independence?"

Then a beat later: "Oh, of course. Rainbows."

As I said, PBS has dropped all pretense of subtlety in its fight against the Bad Man. It's all hands on deck, in the most heavy-handed way if necessary. Thank God for us they don't know anything about running a real ship. It just happens, right?

The white male performers, pop and country, were confined to performances of their contemporary trash hits, the forgettable ones that they mumble through, that no one knows the words to, or will remember five years from now, but which are full of lots of vague pathos and emotion that you feel something. White males are allowed one or two themes at most--worship of my woman. "My Darling, you are the God that I pray to." For country artists, there is also the "I have strong feelings about my home and my roots, although nothing specific that might be offensive."

Thankfully the evening was saved by a single live performance, ironically by a well-known pop musician of the past, whose songs I knew well and could sing along to from my radio-listening days. It was feed of John Fogerty, the former lead singer of Credence Clearwater Revival,  performing from the quarantine of his home on an improvised soundstage with a small band to accompany him. He sang a few of his classic hits. He looked old as the hills. I was amazed that his brilliant tenor voice had held up despite his age. Keeping it in performance shape through the years has been no small feat, to be sure. At first I thought he might be lip-synching, or using some kind of cheat for his voice, but his performance turned out to be real, as indicated by a moment when his voice almost gave out.  

Watching him sing, I noticed the other musicians around him were quite young--two young men and a young woman with long blond hair playing the bass or guitar. Somehow the young woman didn't have the look of female band members I'd seen. She seemed rather innocent, and yet comfortable. "I wonder what her story is?" Then it hit me: "It's his daughter."

A few moments later, J brought up a web page and we found out we were correct. The band members were children of his second marriage. I suddenly felt great love for him and his family. It was real. 

As the fireworks began, Fogerty, ended with a strong performance of "Proud Mary."  It couldn't have been more authentic, even as I thought how many people watching would get angry at him that he had "stolen Tina Turner's song." 

At that moment Fogerty was not a Pop Culture figure. He was not a persona lecturing me about the wisdom what non-famous little old me was supposed to receive from him. He was simply a man, a father, who happened to be a songwriter, and happened to be performing one of his own songs, which happened to be one of the greatest American songs ever written. Now that's the Fourth of July! What treasure that he is still around and can do this. What a privilege it was to see him on the broadcast.

At the end of the evening they showed parts of the fireworks over the Washington Monument and the the Lincoln Memorial. At the very close, the host segued us into a taped performance from 2000 of Ray Charles singing "America the Beautiful." In the past I'd thought of Ray Charles' arrangement, in which he famously sings, in the style of Black-American dialect, "God done shed His grace on thee," as providing an avenue of hope for America in coning to terms with its history of racial strife. Now I realize that was pie-in-the-sky. There is no hope for America, and probably never was any such hope, in a recording of a Ray Charles performance from twenty years ago, as magnificent as it was. There is no hope in any of the famous recorded music performances that inspired us in the past, or in the wisdom of television shows, blockbuster movies, and the characters in them. Postmodernity is failing hard, and dragging ordinary people down into insanity with it. We have to go forward from here armed only with the authentic. 

As far as the song "America the Beautiful" itself, I've come to prefer the original words by Katharine Lee Bates to the Ray Charles arrangement. In the original, the line "God shed His grace on thee" is expressed in the subjunctive mood. That is, it is a plea to the Almighty to perform an action in the present or future, which may be conditional on other things. To understand this point, put the word 'may' at the beginning of the sentence, as it can be an implied word in the archaic form of the subjunctive. Most of the lines of the refrain follow this pattern, which is for example why they say "crown" and not "crowned" in the next line. 

Ray Charles' lyric turns this plea to God into an expression of something that has already taken place in the past. This reflection on history was a beautiful thought at one point, something we needed to hear. But now I think we need the original again.