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photos by Lara Shipley

The Fourth as Cosmopolitan Holiday

July 7th, 2003 · No Comments

The Fourth of July always struck me as an odd choice for a national, “patriotic” holiday. Sure, sure, from one perspective that initial dissolving of the old Political Bands seems the logical candidate. But from another, it’s perfectly weird. For one, the nation whose “national” holiday it is wouldn’t exist for some years yet. (“National,” of course, is the wrong word, strictly speaking. One of the distinctively valuable things about the United States is that it never has been a “nation state.”)

“Patriotism” is from the Latin patria, the “fatherland.” Yet the document whose signing we consecrate on the Fourth was an act of treason, a denial of the binding power of “fatherlands” in the face of people’s desire for freedom. The Declaration was in many ways the ultimate repudiation of “patriotism” as usually conceived.

People do often speak of another, less jingoistic form of patriotism, a quiet sort of pride in the founding principles of the United States. But taken seriously, those principles too stand in tension with the kind of parochialism that patriotism implies. From its opening words—”When in the Course of human Events…”—it makes clear that it speaks in a perfectly general sense, attempts to articulate universal principles. The Declaration doesn’t use the phrase “the rights of Englishmen,” a popular way of expressing what the colonists had demanded, but rather the inalienable rights of “all Men.” True, the authors go on to catalog a very particular train of abuses visited upon the colonists by their own despotic George, but that vital preamble, the part we all remember proudly, is timeless and placeless. If we take it seriously, maybe we should consider the Fourth of July, not an American holiday, but a human one.

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