On this holiday weekend, I want to note that with an exception or two, our Union has never been universal, as in unified or united, much less totally uniform in its common and professional and congressional and judicial and presidential opinion, throughout as I will put it, about 244 of its 250 years.
Those six are the exception, based on my brief scan of history, that are largely warranted in the two world wars, and we’ll only be kind to the politics of the times to give them in a way not necessarily straight divided, about three years each. (Minus World War III that we are basically in, which has a status that unlike a basically charging straightforward transference or you could say transgression, changes by the day, or even group of hours, depending on the press release status of the person at the podium.)
We are a country that is said not to discriminate based on a whole host of factors, some more than others, yet we continue to discriminate in very un-unified but orchestrated ways, concerning all of them.
That is today’s battlefield, (and we’ll get back to that in a few paragraphs, and also being primarily a music website, we’ll throw in a few musical references and twists and shouts). But in days of yore there was the Battlefield of the Republic. Before there even was one, the colonists were not united in whether to wage war with those English overlords who continued to come over “on threshing oar … to reach the western shore.” They were not united in whether various colonies should be left into The Union and form a full “13,” the classic Sabbath CD withstanding. They were not united on either race issues or even whether we should stay together as a union at all, during the Civil War, or to further the analogy, in the name of now unbridled Christendom, for that matter, if there should be the westward expansion that made us form such an allegedly great dominion. Or I dare say, if we should rival the English and the French and continue such so-called dominion through imperialism.
And a bit later, whether we should drop The Bomb, or enter Korea, or Vietnam. (Or the war-protest music slam, or disco damn, as arts and literature were suddenly like never before, possibly, under attack or given their full due as genres. More on that in a minute.) Suddenly I am starting to sound like Billy Joel, and We Didn’t Start The Fire, which has always been churning while justice is yearning and babies are burning.
And on and on. But to the point? Our strength is our diversity, and even our divided thought.
But now …
We have hunger and homelessness continue to be on the rise, yet we have a so-called biggest fireworks display ever on perhaps the biggest-showcase-of-materialism-ever National Mall. On their being held, as our 50 small town state fairs are now I fear being replaced by the corporate-sponsored 50 biggest such entities, in our-only-today’s display of unity. (All this makes our local war on what fireworks are legal, held annually in Wisconsin and Minnesota, seem petty and paltry.) And wrestling matches are staged not at county fairs, but from the giant scaffolding of the aforementioned grand mall, with a certain thin plotline and obliteratingly entertaining if you are in the front row, I’ve been told, but upstaging actual art. All those performers with ethics turned their head on The Donald, to the point that the planned music was muted.
While the actual congressionally-sanctioned event roars on nearby, showing we can’t even be united on The Fourth. Not even on its 250th.
And that patriotic music is just too bland for my tastes, while the Mount Rushmore backdrop amid flags and a flyover or two, of Trump’s holiday speech, where he says he belongs, is too extravagant. So what is the same-day solution, such as it is? Taylor Swift’s wedding, (at the Madison Square Garden that when I was there had rats scurrying about, like the prairie dogs of Rushmore), with I’m sure the speakers rising beyond those giving toasts.
But just who is playing? And not the Chiefs that Kelce made famous.
Reports say Stevie Nicks and Ed Sheeran, spanning eras, as voice reigns over instrumental, with Adam Sandler, in the middle years, as the officiant. Swift has attracted some heat for being rumored to be possibly singing herself, maybe a love song to her new spouse, who himself proposed to her on one knee. They were said to be arriving for the wedding not in a limo, but in a simple SUV, amidst some criticism of lavishness. But one man who just couldn’t stay out of the fervor was Trump, who reportedly issued a poster of himself along with Swift and historical figures in a pose in the style of Eras, the recording she made famous.