We've been traveling far

I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I just don’t know what to tell you on this, the 250^th anniversary of our national birthday.

Pretty sure the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence would side-eye each other and go down the tavern for a gill of brandy if they caught wind of how their bold gamble was turning out. They were ready to risk everything—“our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”—to break away from Mother England; they were overwhelmingly men of property, so they had a lot to lose.

And the men who carefully put together the Constitution, with its first ten amendments, would be equally gobsmacked. Like the Declaration, the Constitution was a response to a failed government (in this case, the confederation) and it was constructed to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. (Liberty figured in both documents, but the concern was lawfulness as a basis for all government actions.) They crafted a form of government that they intended to live and grow; one that would be immune to feckless rulers, corrupt judges or petty legislators because of the built-in checks and balances.

They just didn’t anticipate a circumstance when we would have all three at the same time.

This administration has committed many of the crimes in the Declaration’s indictment of George III, in addition to many others no English king could have imagined. The Kleptocrat is manipulating global stock markets with his tariff declarations; building an armed secret police that can be turned against anyone in the country, citizen or not; declaring war on states, governors, mayors and anyone who doesn’t sufficiently bend the knee to him; breaking international treaties; desecrating national monuments; committing war crimes; violating constitutional provisions; ignoring actual laws; selling off national lands; enriching his family and friends; alienating our allies and squandering our soft power; and generally behaving more despotically than anyone since Ivan the Terrible.

Beyond that, he is visibly rotting both physically and mentally. We’ve all seen him falling asleep at official functions any time he’s not actually speaking. We’ve clocked him staggering and stumbling (on stairs and ramps particularly). We’ve noted his bruised and spackled hands, bloated face, swollen ankles. We’ve listened to him brag about taking repeated cognitive tests as though that’s an achievement, not a warning sign. And—more than anything else—we’ve watched as his speech increasingly slurs, animated only when he gets to grievances (of which he has legion), punctuated by the mangling of multisyllabic words. The guy is the picture of Dorian Gray.

Congress—more specifically, Republicans in Congress—have utterly abrogated their constitutional power because they’re terrified that TACOman will sic his followers on them either politically or physically. They’re willing to kiss the ring just to hold the title (and those sweet, sweet lobbying contributions and insider trading opportunities), as they tug their forelocks and murmur, “Yas, boss” whenever he makes another demand on them. They’ve taken away healthcare from millions of Americans, thrown billions of dollars at ICE, gutted environmental protections and given billionaires and corporations more billions, hustling to get the job done in time to get home for July 4^th fireworks and barbecues with the constituents they’re fucking over.

And the courts—God bless them, the frontline judges and even most of the Circuit judges are doing their damned jobs like Trojans, but the most corrupt SCOTUS in history is in hog heaven, using their court-of-last-appeal power to cut out the constitutional support for decades of progress on civil rights. They’re barely cloaking their intent (or their glee) in their rulings. I’m pretty sure they write “because we can” in all of them and some clerk removes it before they’re released.

So—that’s where we are.

But let me say a few words about what we could be—still.

Tomorrow is the 250^th anniversary of our founding. Which is to say—we’re celebrating the birth of our nation, dating from the day we drove a stake in the ground and said, “We declare ourselves independent,” and setting out the legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England. I’ve written about this before, and it never grows stale.

The Founding Fathers weighed all their options and agreed that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally think is an oxymoron of the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.

And beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might take.

(Yes, we are once again in what Abraham Lincoln referred to as a great test of “whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” See the opening paragraphs of this post.)

But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final surrender.

It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.

Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the ground and work with it. July 4^th was, as they say, close enough for government work.

And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.

The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can. And we can start by celebrating this anniversary like we always do—with barbecues with our neighbors, town parades and local fireworks; not the money-laundering self-referential, tacky displays emanating like a miasma from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

With all that said, what should be our earworm for today? I’m thinking something about how immigration not only enriches the American spirit, but makes it. So Neil Diamond it is.

©2026 Bas Bleu