Waitin’ on the Fourth of July: Thoughts on the National Holiday Through a Literary Lens

“I believe in America.”

These four words, spoken firmly from behind the anonymity of a black screen, portentously set off one of the most engrossing pieces of drama in American cinematic history, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece The Godfather. Spoken in a thick Sicilian accent, they are uttered by a local undertaker to the local crime boss. The man, a working-class Italian immigrant, keeping with a longstanding Sicilian tradition has come to meet the neighborhood ‘Don’ on the day of his daughter’s wedding asking for a favor. His request is simple: his own idea of justice, the kind of justice that can only be enacted outside the confines of the Law. 

From its very beginnings, America has sought to define itself as a place where Justice reigns above all things. A place where the ordinary citizen possesses the theoretical power to bring their grievances to the community, their conscience, property, and personhood protected by the very words enshrined into our founding documents. 

Ever since the day when Thomas Jefferson, inspired by the intellectual ghosts of the Enlightenment heavily borrowed from the works of John Locke and enumerated certain “unalienable rights,” America has also sought to define itself as A Promise. A promise bound by the tenets of Justice and Equality. A Promise, which as history patently shows did not always extend to everyone. 

The history of this country is one that’s marked by the dichotomy between Hope and Fear, a dichotomy that for many of our fellow compatriots remains a sad reality. This country’s history has been shaped by the remarkably dramatic dialectics of Hope, Justice, Virtue, and Optimism and the dark specter of Oppression, Disenfranchisement, Violence, Genocide, Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, as well as any of the other “isms” against which all conscientious people should always take a stand. 

Our history, much like that of most nations across the globe, has also been shaped by different foundational myths. Myths that have nuanced the plot of our National Story. There is the Pilgrim’s Myth of America being a City Upon a Hill or a Beacon of Hope to those souls escaping religious persecution. There is the Virginian Myth of an Entrepreneurial Nation; The Southerner’s Myth of a nation built to serve the needs of a superior Anglo-Saxon race; the Yankee Abolitionist Myth of a Land where Freedom ought to legally belong to all people equally; there is the violent synthesis of both of these myths in the bloody Myth of Manifest Destiny; the urban modern Myth of a Nation of Immigrants; Martin Luther King’s Dream as a Myth for the postmodern era. Through our 247 years as an autonomous nation, we’ve defined ourselves through the Myth of the Melting Pot and the Myth of the Salad Bowl. 

In the midst of all these competing ideas, history has kept churning along. 

Many are the voices that have given credence to these Foundational Myths. Among the works that line the Pantheon of the Great American Novel, we see writers like James Fenimore Cooper commenting on the Anglo-Saxon genocide of our native people in The Last of the Mohicans; we have Nathaniel Hawthorne taking a moral stand against the tyranny of the patriarchal religious society of his ancestors in The Scarlet Letter; Harriet Beecher Stowe railing against the evils of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Herman Melville painting a marvelous picture of a pluralistic society aboard The Pequod while emphasizing the hubris of extreme individualism in Moby Dick. 

Some of our authors have championed our mannerisms while depicting various characters that dot our national landscape in an all-too-human way, like Louisa May Alcott in Little Women, or Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We have seen authors confront the evils of racism like Zora Hurston in Their Eyes Watching God, Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, Toni Morrison in her fantastic novel Beloved, and Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird. Throughout our literary history, readers have also sensed the ennui and reproach of living in an ultra-capitalist and seemingly meaningless society in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and confronted both past and current instances of violence and economic oppression in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Through it all, history has marched forward. 

It’s impossible to say that we live in a country where everyone is satisfied with their lot, mainly because we live in a country where most people seem increasingly unsatisfied with what they perceive as an end to this Promise, whether the Promise was ever fulfilled or it has remained elusive. It would be both obtuse and naively optimistic, not to mention irresponsibly complacent to just “take some of the good with the bad” and pat ourselves on the back, congratulating ourselves on “how far we’ve come.” This would be just as foolish and spurious as shouting against a firework-speckled sky that we’re still somehow the “Greatest Nation on Earth.” 

Too many are the issues dividing a nation where political and cultural polarization have long sadly become the norm. Too great and unbreachable seem the differences in opinion that separate many of my neighbors and colleagues, myself included, from the political and geographic “heart” of a country seemingly rotting at its core. For many people that I know, Fear still stands side by side with a perverse kind of blind neo-patriotism. Injustice and inequity of all kinds- economic, racial, and gender- all seem to loom high and menacingly throughout the land. 

There’s nothing that a writer or an artist can do to bring much-needed remedy, other than perhaps address some of these issues head-on. Writers write. Painters paint. Musicians are tasked with the job of stringing together pieces of sound. Seemingly, and perhaps more pessimistically, there seems to be little that the average person can do either. Workers show up to work, parents shape the course of family lines, and many political leaders, at best, appear incapable of reconciling a house divided by competing cultural ethics and visions. Today, perhaps more than ever in recent memory, dusk seems to have set upon the Great American Experiment. 

And yet, new people continue to arrive; new voices seeking to harmonize with our ongoing National Choir. Just last week at my work, a 27-year-old man from Toluca joined our team. He’s been in the States for less than a month and whatever the length of his tenure within our borders, his life and experience, like those of millions of others like him will hopefully bring a renewed perspective to our National Course. Today, on this Independence Day, in the beloved Delaware of my childhood, a good friend, mixed-race and working-class became a father to a lovely little girl with a genealogy that goes back as far as our country’s roots and as recently as the new wave of Mexican and Latin American immigration of the last forty years. This reality equally applies to my own niece and nephew: new voices ready to join a Whitmanian tune of a future whose crescendo my generation ought to feel gratitude the moment our ears first meet it. 

In his renowned “Song of Myself” from his masterpiece Leaves of Grass, writing on the tumultuous eve of Civil War, Walt Whitman, our longstanding National spiritual guide said: “Do I contradict myself/ Very well then, I contradict myself./ (I am large, I contain multitudes).” The voices that sing our National Song are ever-growing, expanding as fast as our tattered and motley collection of states once did. To this growing choir belong the voices of writers, artists, and intellectuals like Ocean Vuong, Natalie Diaz, Ta-Nehishi Coates, Jeremy O’Harris, John McWorther, and Jia Tolentino to name a few. 

Ours is their song. 

Ours to protect and pass on is a renewed version of this longstanding Promise. 

History keeps marching on.