{"id":10239,"date":"2006-07-04T16:04:55","date_gmt":"2006-07-04T20:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/07\/04\/10239.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:54:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:54:53","slug":"happy-fourth-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/07\/04\/happy-fourth-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Fourth!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger was musing about what to write about, this Independence Day, and did that self-serving blogger thing and looked at my own posts from past Independence Days. I was struck by something Gentle Reader Chris Cobb wrote in a comment<\/a> to my entry of 4 July, 2003. I had meant to address his essay as a whole at some point, and I don’t think I ever did, but what caught my attention this time through was this sentence:\n

Let democracy be understood to be a means to self-government, which is both the real prerequisite for liberty and the responsibility the accompanies liberty.<\/blockquote>\nThis connected in my mind to a Whitman line I didn’t find for another two years about politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses<\/i>. I think this idea of self-government (as an ideal, you understand, as a goal toward which to strive rather than an endpoint to be either reached or rejected) is one we could, nationally, bring back this Independence Day. You will, if you are the sort of person who peruses Left Blogovia for this sort of thing, undoubtedly come across today a variety of references to tyranny, possibly to “obstruct[ing] the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers”, possibly to “erect[ing] a multitude of New Offices, and sen[ding] hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance”, possibly to “render[ing] the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power”, possibly to “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”, possibly to “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”, and possibly even to “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation”. And all that is good, the right and proper job of Left Blogovia on such a day as this in such a time as this.\n

But what worries me, in the long term, is this question of self-government, of something more than superficial suffrage. At the moment, there’s a big discussion in this nation about whether the New York Times was right to publicize certain actions of the government, and tucked away in the conversation about what was actually dangerous, what was legal, and what was responsible was the assumption that the questions were all very far away, involving a large corporation and a government, working out what we should know. There was hardly any sense that we wanted<\/I> to read this stuff, that we want to keep an eye on our own government, who is us<\/I>. In part because this particular administration is not us, at least not in any sense I recognize. But I think that more fundamentally what’s missing is a sense of our own responsibility and our own liberty, and our own fulfillment of the dream of the Founding Fathers, who made a democratic republic to structure the government, but who wanted to make a democracy—not as a government, but as a people.\n

Well, within their own understanding of what that meant, and of course many of them wanted no such thing. But the point is that even if it’s a myth<\/I>, this democracy, it’s a good myth, and an aspiration we don’t need to give up on. And as we celebrate ourselves, and sing ourselves, this Fourth of July, Two Thousand and Six, let’s celebrate what we are not yet, as well as what we have been, and become, a little more each generation, the people worthy of that most glorious of honorifics: democrat.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger was musing about what to write about, this Independence Day, and did that self-serving blogger thing and looked at my own posts from past Independence Days. I was struck by something Gentle Reader Chris Cobb wrote in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17776,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10239\/revisions\/17776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}