Excerpted From:
Wed Jul 04,
2007 at 17:10:20 PM EDT
which brings me to what has been on my mind the most
today. it's both a
question and some answers, a lament of sorts and a celebration.
i should acknowledge that the following screed was
inspired in part by an essay by bill kaufman i read a few days ago.
an excerpt:
There are two Americas: the televised America,
known
and hated by the world, and the rest of us. The former is a fictitious
creation whose strange gods include "Sex and the City," accentless TV
anchorpeople, Dick Cheney, Rosie O'Donnell, "Friends," and the
Department of Homeland Security. It is real enough--cross it and you'll
learn more than you want to know about weapons of mass destruction--but
it has no heart, no soul, no connection to the thousand and one real
Americas that produced Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint
Dorothy Day and the Mighty Casey who has struck out.
I am of the other America, the unseen America, the
America undreamt of
by the foreigners who hate my country without knowing a single thing
about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of
wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their
goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of
their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons
and drunkards who made their places live.
you can and should read the rest here.
the whole bit about the ol' VFD and such may strike some
as cliche' and
hokey and it just may be. whatever floats your boat. however, as one
from a small town, a small southern town, these images (i'm a
filmmaker. i can't help it. i think in pictures.) ring quite true and
real.
george bush II is not my america. karl rove is not my
america. these clowns
are nothing more than criminals, gangsters, usurpers.
my america is jefferson (with all his faults), marion
anderson, samuel
gompers, will rogers, abraham lincoln, dr. martin luther king,
faulkner, steinbeck, john ford, jackie robinson, twain, kathleen hanna,
willie, barbara jordan, louis armstrong, tom paine, tom sawyer, tom
jones, sam and dave. it's muddy waters and woody allen, sacco and
vanzetti.. ..sacco and vanzetti.. ..sacco and vanzetti.
my america is monk, miles, arthur miller, walker percy,
jackson
pollock, jello biafra, jello and john prine. it's ammendments 1 and 4.
it's mamet, it's the missouri, the mississippi and the ohio. it's bull
run and bunker hill. it's boston and blountstown. it's the cubbies and
cowtowns and hank sr. it's those four little girls in birmingham.
my america is chomsky and chi-town, cesar chavez, johnny
cash, yogi berra, peanut butter and jelly. it's woody freakin'
guthrie.
it's frederick douglass, john brown and jack white. it's bed-stuy and
the upper east side. it's whitman, frost, ginsberg and auden. it's the
fourth of july and the drag queens of stonewall, too.
my america is 'venus in furs' and 'rhapsody in blue'.
it's the place
that nabakov, brodsky, and solzhenitsyn fled to. it's james brown. it's
dylan thomas, dylan and poe. it's harriet tubman, susan b. anthony and
harper lee. it's black elk. it's joey ramone. it's the 6 train and the
chattanooga choo-choo. it's apalachicola. it's a place that enron will
never buy nor sell, a place that tom delay will never find comfort.
it's a place where folks is folks and they're just trying to do the
best that they can for themselves and for their community. community.
remember that idea? the idea that the whole freakin' endeavour was
founded upon? the whole "...
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our
Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." thing?
it's an idea with no owner and no arbiter and it's the
reason that try
as they may, the greedhead empire builders will never be able to
completely co-opt or destroy it. you can fool some of the people some
of the time....
today i declare my independence. i declare my
independence from that other televised, contrived, market researched,
focus grouped and thoroughly fictional america. i pledge allegiance to
our founding documents and the precious and wise ideas contained
therein, to my neighbors, to the seemingly antiquated notions of
decency and fairness. i pledge allegiance to the idea that dissent is
indeed a patriotic endeavor, to the bill of rights and its preservation
in these perilous times. i swear solemn vigilance to speak truth to
power whenever and wherever i find that power is less than honest or
lacking in candor.
my america is all of these things, these folks and these
ideas. my
america is not to be trifled with, it is not to be dismissed.
Read the rest of the article here
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