Fourth of July Memories

Some twenty-five years ago my wife and I and a couple dozen friends, mostly from college, met every 4th of July down at the National Mall to make a day of the festivities. In those days glass bottles were prohibited but cans were permitted and one could still take coolers filled with beer (oh, and food) and stake out some territory by the Washington Monument for a perfect overhead view of the fireworks.

We were all in our 20's or early 30's at most, in the final days of the first stage of our adult lives, still mostly childless and still early in our careers, mostly as doctors or lawyers -- lots of lawyers! -- with an odd journalist or bureaucrat or two as well. After all, we are talking about Washington, D.C. here. People played Frisbee and shot off illegal bottle rockets and ate and drank and burned in the hot July sun. Even then, the most casual look at the tens of thousands of people who had gathered on the Mall made it obvious beyond question that we are both a nation of immigrants and a single people.

These were the early days of the Reagan Administration, and in 1981 and 1982 that most quintessentially American band, the Beach Boys, played their most quintessentially innocent and joyful music at the big concert stage down by the Monument. The National Symphony also played pop and light classical music at the Capitol steps, but that was at the other end of the Mall and, besides, even today I'd opt for "Fun, Fun, Fun" over Tchaikovsky in a heartbeat.

But 1983 was far and away my favorite year, for it was then that Interior Secretary James Watt decided the Beach Boys were, well, attracting the wrong element to the Mall and booked Wayne Newton instead. Perhaps Watt was a secret fan of Lenny Bruce, who once observed that there was no place in America more American than Las Vegas. In any case, Wayne brought all the trappings of his Vegas act with him, complete with dozens of feather-headdress wearing, scantily clad but sequin festooned showgirls. It doesn't get any more American than that, except perhaps at the Folies-Bergere in Paris.

Getting close to the stage was much harder than when the Beach Boys played because it was already heavily surrounded by a mosh pit of silver-blue haired women. Fortunately, their average height was only around 5'4", so I didn't have to elbow my way through little old ladies to see the stage clearly. It was, to put it mildly, quite a show. Newton sang his hits as the showgirls shook their, well, you know, and concluded appropriately enough with "America the Beautiful." But then he came back to do a Vegas style encore, probably "Danke Schoen" though I don't recall exactly, and it was at that exact moment that I grasped the genius of Watt's decision. Alas, Nancy Reagan liked the Beach Boys better and they were back the next year, another government program that, once started, refused to go away.

The fate of the United States, indeed, of the Earth was still very much in jeopardy in those days from the Cold War's Mutually Assured Destruction. Thank God, it never happened, but we lived with that terrible risk as we now seem incapable of living with the risk of a small number of fanatical enemies who, even in our most nightmarish scenarios, don't pose a tenth of a percent of that decades-long threatened nuclear holocaust. Our biggest complaints about air travel were that it was uncomfortable, boring, expensive and too often delayed. We were spending a vast fortune on defense, but at least we were defending ourselves against a credible threat. Accusations of an imperial presidency focused more on Nancy's White House china patterns than on jackbooted thugs hauling U.S. citizens off to prison without so much as a hint of due process.

Of course, both the world and America have changed in many ways for the better in the past quarter-century. Many, but not all. I have no idea what sort of controlled environment or enhanced security the National Park Service is imposing on the crowds today down at the Mall, but I know I want no part of it. And I'm not at all nostalgic for the 1980s, however much this comes across that way. Sure, I'd like my youth back, but that doesn't mean I'd like to be living in 1983 again.

I merely note, like Joni Mitchell, that the passage of time involves loss as well as gain. Some things, like youth, we cannot help but lose. Whether we lose other things, like the courage to demand free lives and accountable government, is up to us, as is our relationship with the rest of the world. I, for one, would prefer the world to think of us as a people willing to risk a bottle rocket or two with a can of beer in our hands singing along to "Fun, Fun, Fun," than for the nationalistic bombast of the 1812 Overture, especially when you consider how the Battle of Borodino turned out.