Normally, I’d whoop it up on July 4th. I often made annual “patriotic posts”; sometimes I posted the full text of the Declaration of Independence.
This year is different. It’s so much bigger and so much happier.
The enemies of liberty, often attacking from the inside, are fading out lately. I once thought they were deadly serious horrifying intellectual monsters. They turned out to be useless losers and raving lunatics. What a relief!
I’ve so much gratitude. I’m still here. America is still here. It’s so damn wonderful. I don’t need anything more. I’ll touch off fireworks and have a sip of whiskey and spend all day grinning but I won’t be howling at the moon like my younger self.
I witnessed, as a child, America’s 200th anniversary. I’m going to see the 250th. I’ve seen the circular nature of things. I’ve seen attacks on my beloved nation; they’ve been so long and so continuous and so inept and so pointless… I no longer worry the clowns will wreck the circus.
Think of all the stupid negativity that has come before and how much remains to arrive… and think about how it’s all a fart in a windstorm. Liberty and freedom glow brightly from the soul, being a clown is just makeup and mental illness.
Step back and enjoy that you’re not nuttier than squirrel shit.
They act out the fiction that our nation is always going to hell in a handbasket. The world is always doomed. The end is forever nigh.
That’s because despair is a tool to wound the self-reliant. Despair turns a citizen into voting livestock. Media (starting with newspapers and daily news on my black and white TV as a kid and continuing to the spyware on my cell phone today) is always hammering at the same thing; give up hope. Feel doomed. Feel helpless. Do not strive. They hate men that are self reliant and growing. They want human shaped holes of despair. They want you to bitch that the Government should show up on a magic carpet to serve you breakfast and then bitch more when it doesn’t.
Don’t let them pull you down. America rocks. The nation was amazing and continues to be so. The media and most politicians are a collection of sullen, unskilled, nutsacks. They’re too pathetic to build something new and splendid. They compensate by attacking your mental health. (Notice what they do to their own mental health. They’re sad, unfulfilled, bitter people.)
Back in ’76 the world was officially going to shit. Did you know that? Did you know the forces arrayed against freedom were doing it in the streets and scaring the horses?
The nation had recently crawled up it’s ass over Nixon (an event I see differently with perspective), it had shoved it’s face into a blender over ‘Nam, it had barely shaken out the hangover from the 1960’s, the 55 MPH national speed limit was law, inflation was high, the beer was crap, TV was black and white, and the people were about to elect a president who would be considered the worst president ever (until very recently).
Not long after the bicentennial, Captain Weaksauce (Carter) fucked up everything domestic and foreign like it was an Olympic sport. Meanwhile, I was told the Russkies were a mighty juggernaut. They’d surely drop the bomb and turn me into a radioactive skeleton. Which was only one of dozens of ways my youthful self was completely fucked; overpopulation was unavoidable, climate change (upcoming ice age!) would kill us all, and the worst horror of all, we’d run out of oil long before I was old enough to have a car. Later they’d tell me I shouldn’t get laid in said car because AIDS would be a virtual death sentence. (Fauchi had a long career.)
Do all those lies sound familiar? They should. It’s the same shit they’re serving today.
What’s the success rate of their predictions? Did overpopulation starve us all. Did the Russkies nuke Baltimore? Did the ice age freeze our balls off? Did Fauchi’s dramatics turn AIDS into the bubonic plague and depopulate 2/3 of Europe? Did privately owned cars go away? Did they (as promised) make us eat ants? (That was a thing when I was in elementary school. Do you think it’s new?)
Life isn’t all puppies and roses. AIDS really did suck for a lot of people. The Soviet Union really was awful.
Some stuff declined. Movies have become so derivative they’re unwatchable. Much of our music is autotuners and losers who can’t read sheet music. Universities quit being places of learning. New good books are rare.
Some things got mired in stasis. Cars are still regulated mercilessly, and they’re still huge, and commies still hate that they’re privately owned. Cuba is still Cuba. We never got back to the moon.
Some things improve, but only marginally. The replacement to the horrific USSR isn’t perfect but it’s not worse. (Don’t bark like seals over Ukraine unless you can name all the USSR satellite nations that are now significantly freer.) Pot is somehow absolutely not legal and definitely legal; which is weird. Unlike the end of prohibition we just can’t get our shit together and make a clean decision.
Some things improved so much nobody remembers how much they seemed insolvable. The 55 MPH speed limit is gone and forgotten. East Germany and West Germany merged. The Cubs won the series!
Some things were predictable but funny “self owns”. We all stopped smoking, and we all got fat. We got generous welfare so a lot of people quit working (and got fat). Food got cheaper and cheaper and less and less healthy. Did I mention we got fat? Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban riled up rednecks so much that everyone bought many more guns than anyone imagined. Beer went “microbrew” and got so good that Bud Light tried going gay to compete. (I remember New Coke doing about the same thing.) Obamacare was passed; nobody remembers the $2,500 a year savings we were promised but at least we can bitch about poor quality and longer waits. Alaska gave up on the bridge to nowhere. California built exactly zero miles of its wonder train.
The prediction in 1976 was unmitigated doom but life is never as simple or as tragic as threatened. Life is a mix of good and bad and many unexpected consequences; as it should be.
Predictions now are the same unmitigated doom of 50 years ago. If you’re pissing and moaning about how “America won’t last another year” you’re eating the same shit sandwich I tasted in 1976.
They’ve been so spectacularly wrong that the jokes write themselves. This Independence Day they’re pissed about algae. Theoretically adult human beings are freaked about how Trump made water clean. If that’s their biggest fear it’s a pretty weak fear. I grew up expecting to fight a ravaging horde for the last can of beans in a Malthusian doomsday.
If your nightmare is clean water in a pool and Americans enjoying a mixed martial arts event on the White House lawn; you need to read more Lovecraft.
The enemies of freedom got too silly. They made themselves spastic, then foolish, and inevitably they drift into irrelevancy. A jittery neon parade of pompous, unaccomplished, imbeciles has been squawking my whole life about one panic after another. It’s a “them” problem, not a “real world” issue.
When someone shrieks that rabid zombie space elephants will disembowel me with a weaponized Dorito it’s second nature to tune it out. All normal people do the same. Insane people just plain got too weird. They’re not even creative. If you’re fretting about algae you’ve run out of ideas. Find a new hobby.
Nobody knows where the flood crested and began to recede. I think they shot their wad in 2020. The plague didn’t kill me. The absolutely amazing statistical marvel of No Malarkey Joe’s record vote count accomplished… what exactly? Sure, a lot of damage was done and for a while the biggest human trafficking scheme was either our government or organizations illicitly funded by our government. But then what? We didn’t burn down. We didn’t implode. We didn’t meet at Gettysburg and flatten each other. The promised utopia of gay rainbow unicorn farts didn’t materialize. The free shit army looked ascendant but didn’t have a plan to actually run things. Now we see them as merely NGO graft spread like butter over the young unaccomplished and old never-accomplished.
You know how I mentioned 1976? Seems a million years ago right? Just this year the groovy fossils were protesting with their heavy hitter… decrepit octogenarian Jane Fonda. It’s 2026! I didn’t know she was still alive. They’re trying to “get the band back together” but unless someone hands them graft money, all they’ve got is… cat ladies? Really?
So it’s with great pleasure that I’ll celebrate, with contentment and gratitude, my nation’s 250th birthday. Years ago, I expected that I’d be drunk this whole week in sheer ecstasy, but now that it has arrived, I’m even happier than that. Join me in embracing the deep abiding joy of watching something good endure while the forces of evil piss themselves.