Happy Birthday Beloved Country

Today we were invented. With all the chatter about American exceptionalism, it's useful to remember that our uniqueness comes from inventing ourselves and our form of government. We aren't exceptional because of our military prowess or economic might. We aren't exceptional because of what Newt Gingrich says that we are the arsenal of democracy or manifest destiny. In fact, the Founding Fathers did not want to standing army and Washington warned us against alliances and wars. We were an underdeveloped country which chose to fight a revolution for independence and create a government based on law and liberty.

What was totally not evident was that "We hold these truths to be self-evident." There is nothing self-evident now about these rights and they weren't then. To achieve these rights has taken a perpetual struggle. All men are created was postponed and led to a Civil War and another century of hard struggle. Only in the twentieth century were all women created equal. I was always taught that America was an on-going experiment in self-government for the purpose of aspiring to a more perfect union. Frequently our representative democracy has been a risk and progress has been thwarted and delayed.

But the words of our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights have inspired millions of others around the world to demand their political rights and civil liberties beginning with the French Revolution through the Velvet Revolution and onto Iran's Green Revolution. The polite fiction of the words written by Thomas Jefferson inspired the adoption after WWII of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a host of international covenants agreed to by the global community.

But our founding fathers saw other threats to freedom than just a colonial power. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison felt that corporations were obstacles to self-government. While Washington even created a corporation to expand the Potomac, he felt they should be controlled by the state with limited life. Thomas Jefferson denounced corporations for their incessant need for profit and that they did not contribute to the public good. James Madsion wrote flat out that corporations hindered self-government. Yet our current Supreme Court in Citizens United ruled that not only are corporations persons but enjoy all the rights given under our constitution to individuals.

Our founding fathers were highly skeptical about the role religion should play directly in our politics. Washington himself wanted churches prohibited from participating in policy discussions. Ironically, in his Farewell Address, he spoke about how religious values supported our democracy. As Conor Cruise O'Brian has written in his latest biography of Washington, these words were written by Alexander Hamilton and weren't in the first draft of the Farewell Address, which was meant to be delivered after one term of office.

It is commonplace to say that the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian values. But this phrase only came about in the late 1940s when America was enthralled by the Jewish people creating the state of Israel. It was never used before then. Luckily, the Pilgrims and our Founding Fathers were philo-Semitic but by the late 19th century and early 20th century we had become infected with anti-semitic thinking and behavior. A dark patch in our history was the proliferation of theories on race, which heavily influenced the eugenics policies and the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany, a chapter America instantly forgot with World War II. In a way, the embrace of Israel by our Religious Right serves to innoculate us from that dark disease. But it was not always so.

The embrace of America as the country of immigrants was also fairly recent. This past week, our greying President eloquently outlined a policy of immigration reform,eulogizing the contribution made to this country by immigrants. In my view, the speech represented the type of vision of this society we need to hold dear. But that wasn't always so.

Not until the 1930s would General Petraeus be considered "white". His Greek ancestry was not considered a " desireable" ethnic group like all other Mediterraneans and Central Europeans. His ancestry would be considered a "mongrelization of the race."It was only with the election of FDR that this attitude changed and it did so because of government policy. With the resurgence of the KKK, this time aimed at immigrants, and the very public anti-semiticism of Henry Ford and Lindbergh, the Roosevelt Administration used radio for the first time in a civic education program called "What is an American?". Later this became a hit song by Paul Robeson and , even more ironically, the theme song of a Republican National Convention. By then, all politicians sang praises of immigrants.

The original American Revolutionaries invented America on a wing and a prayer. Periodically, the country is called into question. In the late 1880s, Christians began their revisionist histories of the country, which have been revived today. The racist element in a society, marginalized for the last few decades, has re-emerged through the participation of the white supremacist groups assisting writing anti-immigration laws in Arizona and about a dozen other states. The secessionist question, which even Tony Scalia declared closed permanently, has been re-opened with Governors in various states threatening to action for the first time in my lifetime. A vice presidential candidate of the Party of Abraham Lincoln had a husband who was an active member of a secessionist group, the Alaska Independence Party.

The first generation of Americans were highly skeptical of political parties or factions as they called them. James Fenimore Cooper wrote whole books denouncing the development of political parties in America. For my lifetime, political parties managed to move the country around different parts of the center. But now we have a major party, which has embraced the lunatic fringe,all those elements in our society which we had managed to overcome in our struggle to move toward a more perfect union. While political polemics, even among the Founding Fathers, could get vitriolic and raw, they didn't have internet and mass media outlets, which could propagate lunacy on a 24/7 basis.

The dismantling of the idea of America, this great invention,is in active overdrive today with the rewriting of history textbooks and the elevation of quacks on the radical right. We have a large segment of our population which has given up on the idea of self-government and democracy. The only point of obtaining political office is to dismantle what government structures still exist.

During the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan, Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma asked her whether we were as free today as in 1980. Presumably, he was referring to the election of Ronald Reagan. He lamented the infringment of government into our daily lives and the perceived threat by his state of the federal government to individual liberties. Well, the answer depends on who you are. For women, the opportunities in the political arena have increased dramatically. If you believe in rule by white authoritarian males probably not. If you were a factory worker with your job shipped overseas maybe not but it's not because of the federal government. It's an old question. The same question Southern Senators used to raise during the Civil Rights period when they lamented the death of their white culture.

I would say I'm less free because national security law trumps the Constitution. I would also say I am less secure today because the United States for the first time overtly embraced the notion of having an empire during the George W. Bush administration. But am I less free in terms of my day-to-day life? No. And neither are the teabaggers for all their rhetoric.

As Benjamin Franklin said, "You have a Republic, if you can keep it." Franklin would have loved President Obama for his embrace of science and technology. He would have thought this man was continuing his great work. Only this past week the Administration announced funding for extending internet to rural America, a move that will rival in importance FDR's Rural Electrification Program.

But the question remains whether we can keep it. Happy Birthday everybody.