The Touch of Independence

On the second weekend of this month, the language of patriotism is convalescing. Statue , lady and torch are off soaking their feet. Liberty has gone fishing. Freedom is taking short walks and eating lightly. Kindle , kept alive entirely by its use as a metaphor, has been wrapped in tissue paper and put away for 2086. Golden door has gone back to being an expensive health resort, and Emma Lazarus is quoted about as often as Alfred Austen.

The language of celebration is a funny thing. It is necessary and appropriate on occasions such as the one we have just been through. Yet it is depleting at the same time. Like celebrity, it tends to fade the thing celebrated. The wary look above the beauty-contest smile is the natural reaction to being told, in effect, “you’re gorgeous.” There’s not a lot of life in being told “you’re gorgeous” or “you’re great” unless, at the same time, some more nurturing message is slipped in, such as “you’re human.”

There’s no reason to object to last week’s oratory. “We are the city on the hill.” “We are the keepers of the flame of liberty; we hold it high tonight for the world to see.” “Liberty shimmers.” “The rays of her crown.” But the most refreshing thing the newspapers did all weekend, at least here in the East, was to reprint the text of the Declaration of Independence. The Boston Globe, as it does every year, used it for its editorial.

I suppose a lot of people have actually read the Declaration. In at least some school districts around the country, it is assigned somewhere along the curriculum. My own education was sufficiently miscellaneous so that, despite five decades of fairly assiduous reading, I never did read it. Not until this past weekend, in fact, when I turned to it with the thought that a touch of independence might be a break from all the liberty going around.

It was a shock; of the cold water, clear stream variety. It made me instantly grateful for that distracted eighth- or ninth-grade teacher who never thought to assign it. There is a lot to be said for not reading the great works in school. But that is another subject.

What the Declaration instantly reveals is that its language is in no way celebratory, and much less, self-celebratory. Of course, it has grace and sometimes grandeur, but that is not the point. It is working language; language intended to do a job. It is an argument that is specific, detailed and down-to-earth; like a lawyer’s brief or a union’s bill of grievances.

How splendidly concrete the grievances are. There is some hyperbole in them but it has the ring of folk art, of the American tall tale. “He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat our substance.” The buzzing of those swarms can be plainly heard, and those sharp little teeth plainly felt; particularly by any taxpayer around April 15.

My personal favorite is the complaint about the King convoking the Colonial legislatures “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.” Next time anybody tries to fatigue me into compliance, I shall have my phrase handy.

The Declaration doesn’t say “how wonderful we are.” It says “where do we go from here?” It says that the signatories are selling the furniture and breaking the law--”Our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”--and will you come along? It doesn’t tell us “You’re gorgeous”; it asks us out on a date. A tough date.

A declaration of rebellion is a radical thing, of course; more radical than a declaration of war. Yet our Declaration does what must be very rare: it concedes the element of dubiety that is inherent in any radical action, even while affirming the action.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

It is not a turn of thought much to be found in the public declarations of our day, in our own country or anywhere else. It seems to say: We will do such and such because we are sure we are right. We do not say we are 100% sure; we are 70% sure. But since, one way or the other, we must act, we act upon that 70%.

Nowadays, we live amid the rhetoric of the 100%. There was the harmless 100% of the Liberty celebrations--harmless, except that we can’t stand more than a few weeks of it. There is the 100% of most presidential declarations about the defense budget, or taxes or the policy in Nicaragua.

But our 100% covers more than that. A lot of our social, economic, emotional and aesthetic rhetoric is keyed right up there.

“How goes it?” “Great.” It’s the answer we give without thinking about it. To say “well” or even “very well” sounds odd and forced; it calls attention to itself. But that 100% “great,” assuming we have not just won the lottery or fallen in love, strains the emotions, coarsens them, deprives them of suppleness. It is like singing at a continual fortissimo. And if it has no meaning, it coarsens our language and eventually, our thought.

The cult of the best has something of the same effect. Restaurant reviews that pick out the five finest places to eat; movie lists that choose the 10 top foreign films. How good can perfection be? How often can it be? Do you make an appointment with it? Do you schedule your epiphanies, planning to see a revival of “Grand Illusion” next Tuesday and to go to the latest sublime restaurant a week from Friday?

Publishers Weekly carried an ad last week for a guide book called “Courvoisier’s Book of the Best.” “What is the best nightclub in America?” the headline goes. “Where is the best winter resort? Who makes the best ice cream?”

What, I wonder, would be the best nightclub to go to if you had just heard that an old friend was mortally ill? What would be the best winter resort if you were about to squeeze your budget to contribute to famine relief? What is the world’s finest ice cream parlor if you are out on a warm evening and there is a handy ice cream place on the next block?

“The best,” “100%,” “perfection” are concepts that leave us out. What does it mean to sit in a restaurant and be told that we’re at the best? What does it mean to celebrate in a country that tells itself that we are a sheer marvel? What do we have to offer?

Years ago, I went to interview Milovan Djilas shortly after he had been released from prison. With all the intelligence, passion and ruthlessness he possessed, he had served a totalitarian utopia of the left. When he began to doubt and to work for his doubts, Tito jailed him. In prison, writing his thoughts on toilet paper, and now in his dingy Belgrade apartment, this pale and still passionate man meditated his new ideal. “The imperfect society,” he called it; later, he would make it the title of a book.

The imperfect society, the imperfect restaurant, the imperfect memory, the imperfect book. Does that sound dismal? Try using “perfect” and see how infinitely more dismal it is. Rather than be told I am gorgeous, I would like to be asked to come for a walk. The Statue of Liberty language was OK. But I prefer Jefferson’s.