I am a Yankee Doodle Dandy

When my mom went to the hospital when she was pregnant with me when we lived in Decatur in that small duplex near the seminary, my dad said, since it was late July 1st, "as long as he's not born on the Fourth of July." I don't know why he said that. My dad says lots of things that elude a discovery of origins, but that he's a private man and the Fourth is the least private of holidays. My mom went into over 48 hours of labor (she would later expand the hours into the 50s, 60s and 70s as she grew older and needed counter arguments to my arguments. I was supposed to be humbled by the agony I'd put her through and do what she told me to do.). I was born at 7:58 am in Covington, GA - since it would not do for me to be born outside the family precincts.
I've enjoyed it. My dad's fears seemed beside the point. Louis Armstrong was born on the Fourth - so there's an artistic precedence. Wherever I've been there've been fireworks. Usually I get the day off. It's summer and perhaps people will be having a picnic. The Fourth is a good excuse to eat hot dogs and drink beer and hang out in the sun. We need more such secular national holidays. More mandatory time off to clamber along lake shores and produce explosions.
The middle photo is a photo of a photo in an album at my cousin Lurilene's house. Jami and I visited Lurilene this Sunday. While there we leafed through photos and heard family stories. This is one of my favorite things to do. The photo above is of Lurilene's husband as an child at a Fourth of July parade with his sister.
The bottom photo is a snap I took of the fireworks here in Decatur a few years ago. Bob, Kelly and their kids, Annalee and Michael, asked me to meet them behind the MacDonald's where there's a good view of the local show. Taking a photo of fireworks is not that easy. I think you could either go for fast shutter speeds and capture fantastically detailed explosions, or you could slow the shutter speed and get wonderfully blurry explosions. This is about the best my camera will allow.
The top photo is what it is: a celebration of American patriotism and puritanism. How can a nude celebrate puritanism? How can it not? What does America today have in common with Vienna circa 1890? A lot of porn and a lot of guaranteed public outcry about sex: the great double standard - and is it any wonder Freud got his start in that Vienna? I have a great deal of ambivalence about this country: loving it and wishing that it were France or Italy.
God bless our country and take away our army as a tool of corporations, our airforce as a tool of defense contractors, and our navy as a tool of political pork.
God bless our country and take away our wealth.
God bless our country and give us hearts that value humanity above profit and ideology.
God bless our country and free us from Global Capitalism - the real beast.
Take away our love of violence, our belief that words are weak and that only force works.
Give us hearts of love and compassion.
Give us a love of real leisure - and not the leisure industry.
Give us a love of nature - so that we would preserve it and punish those who would destroy it under the mantra of "jobs" or "free market."
Give us real health care.
Give us leaders and not thieves and brigands.
Take away leaders who get by by generating fear and pushing buttons of racism and greed.
Give us the enlightenment realm that Jefferson and Madison and Adams dreamed of.
Those words on the Georgia state seal "wisdom justice moderation" - give them meaning in our society as more than a joke, an ironic pose of history, but as words that define us in civility of discourse and compassion of advocacy for the margins of society.
In Jesus name,
Amen