by Joseph Robertson

Created on: July 24, 2008

The Fourth of July is an American standard. It is a day of celebrations, of national fanfare, national idiosyncrasy, encounters with the outdoors, and the landscape and the feel of people coming together, a celebration of common experience, and of difference. It is so intimate a part of the national fabric that this particular holiday actually helps illuminate what sense of connectivity there is across the cultural spectrum that comprises American society.

It is a day of national communion but which is rooted in ideas and the joy of independence, not in chauvinistic nationalism. Essentially, we celebrate the right to have a say, to take a stand, to change what we cannot countenance, to make an honest effort at betterment of our condition and that of those around us, to disagree and to live with the knowledge that we can do so without fear of persecution. And there we see how liberty is also responsibility.

We celebrate words, and the gift and bounty of words freely accessed and dispersed in the community. As Ezra Pound put it: "The mot juste is of public utility We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate." We are a society of letters, rooted in text and written reasoning, ever expanding the thrash and cobbling of our ideas into a press of discovery and dissent, of aspiration and correction.

We have, as the nation's founders envisioned, made a fabric of voices in which distinction is permitted and prized. Whether we engage with holy scripture or founding documents, statues and treaties or the poetry of progress, the tabloid cheap or the confessional biopic, we are each of us like words themselves in the great epic of individual dreaming and liberty, where we can deal with edges, with difference perceived, where difference is a positive quality and the "fragmentation" of the whole does not break it up into torn shreds but lets it go deeper into the telling of philosophical and adversarial vignettes.

We celebrate truth and the beauty of coming near to it. The Declaration of Independence reads as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes

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