The Spirit of '26

I couldn't let the quarter-millennium anniversary of my country's founding go unremarked!

I don't really have anything sufficiently profound or inspiring to say, but I did find something quite nice posted in social media a few hours ago by first-amendment warrior Greg Lukianoff (currently the president of a great organization called FIRE):

I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.

I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:

• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.
• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.
• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)
• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.
• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.
• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.
• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.
• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.
• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.
• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.
• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.

That's the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it. What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 

Anyway, please go and watch the musical 1776, or maybe Robin Williams' underrated Moscow on the Hudson, or even Captain America: The First Avenger, on this fine day!

Resonances and Dancing Babies

In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," Borges sets up a fascinating thought experiment.  Can someone stretch their mind far enough to be able to re-create (word by word, but without actually "copying") a classic text that someone else wrote hundreds of years ago?

Borges is sly, so he's not really suggesting that anyone really attempt such a feat.  However, there are times when I've come across a text that channels my own experience to quite a spooky degree.  If I started writing about those experiences, who's to say whether I would put down the same words in the same order?  I once mentioned a resonant certainty about one line in Dylan's Tangled Up in Blue, but there is another. 

Well,
In this life, I've seen everything I can see, woman
I've seen lovers flying through the air hand in hand

In 1990, that was me, flying to London with the woman that I would ask to marry me at Stonehenge a few days in the future.

I've seen babies dancing in the midnight sun

In 1997, that was me, walking through Oslo's Vigeland Park in June, not realizing it was 11pm because it was still well-lit daylight.  Those creepy statues of babies, yes, dancing, but doing even weirder things, too, have stuck with me for decades.  I'm glad that I'm still close with the two friends that explored that place with me.

And I've seen dreams that came from the heavenly skies above

Oh, you don't want to know about 2002, when I was in the hospital for 11 days, and the morphine produced three consecutive days of dreams that I wrote down and will never forget.  Actually, this was more about 2012, when another (non-substance-assisted) dream had me standing at the foot of a thousand-foot high temple to the ancient Greek gods.  Despite not being an actual Hellenic pagan, in the dream I looked up, and sang and sang and sang.

I've seen old men crying at their own grave sides

In the late 1970s, channel 9 (WOR) in New York would play Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol every December.  (Link required because who would believe such a thing existed?) We all know what the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed to ol' Ebeneezer, but in cartoon form, that just messed me up.

And I've seen pigs all sitting watching picture slides
But I never seen nothin' like you

In a proper life, the lows are low, but the highs are high.  It's one big package.

Do ya, do ya want my love? (Woman)
Do ya, do ya want my face? (I need it)
Do ya, do ya want my mind? (I'm sayin')
Do ya, do ya want my love?

Well I heard the crowd singin' out of tune
As they sat and sang 'Auld Lang Syne' by the light of the moon

Back to 1990 in London.  Nearing midnight on December 31, we went out and joined crowds near Big Ben.  However, when this group of American tourists started singing this, um, distinctly Scottish Hogmanay song, the Brits around us started giving us a bit of the stink eye.

I heard the preacher bangin' on the drums

In 1991, I was on a midwestern college campus, and I followed a classmate who wanted to gawk at the crowd gathered around "Brother Ted," a traveling preacher serving up some fire and brimstone (with, I'm pretty sure, some others on the drums and tamborines) in the quad.  My classmate began to heckle the guy something awful.  I was still mostly a skeptical atheist at the time, and I suppose I agreed with the content of the heckling, but I really didn't like the vibe.  I never went back for subsequent rounds of "debate."

And I heard the police playin' with their guns

Well, I think I've told the story before that I had a ticket on American Airlines Flight 11, Boston to LAX, on Saturday, September 15, 2001.  That flight was cancelled (you can do the rest of the math) and the airports were full of guns for the next few years.

But I never heard nothing like you

The rest just follows logically, doesn't it?  It's one big package.

In the country where the sky touches down on the field
She lay her down to rest in the morning sun
They come a-runnin' just to get a look
Just to feel, to touch her long black hair
They don't give a damn

But I never seen nothin' like you

Do ya, do ya want my love? (Woman)
Do ya, do ya want my face? (I need it)
Do ya, do ya want my mind? (I'm sayin')
Do ya, do ya want my love?

Well, I think you know what I'm trying to say, woman
That is, I'd like to save you for a rainy day
I've seen enough of the world to know
That I've got to get it all to get it all to grow

Do ya, do ya want my love? (Come on now)
Do ya, do ya want my face? (I need it)
Do ya, do ya want my mind? (Alright now)
Do ya, do ya want my blood?

Oh, look out
Do ya, do ya want my love?
Do ya, do ya want my love?