I am deeply sorry for starting up the legitimacy talk again.
For what it's worth, my distaste for legitimacy and Americana may well stem from my not being American, though I wouldn't say it's unfounded. I just really don't like it when America and its past are lionised like they are, and treating the Declaration of Independence as an American Excalibur (name of my band) rather than just an interesting historical document rankles me and shows hints of a culture that I'd rather the Commonwealth not develop.
That said, if we're gonna try for legitimacy anyway, which it looks like we are, then fuck it, might as well do it on July 4 '76 to get all that star-spangled blood properly boiling.
I mean, every country has symbols that are important to them.
You are
from some place. You were raised by people who had
some idea of what it meant to be who and what they were. For the Greeks, being G
reek meant speaking Greek, worshiping Greek gods, and dressing in Greek ways. To BE Greek was to ACT Greek. It was to attend the Olympic Games, to stand in the phalanx. To be a citizen of a Polis of one sort or another.
Despite Roman culture being Greek fanfiction, Romans had very different ideas of what it means to
be Roman. The French and Germans and Russians all have their own conception of Frenchness or Germanness or Russianness. So to do us Americans have our own symbols of what it means to
BE American. Symbols have meaning, for Christians the Cross is more than just two sticks affixed together perpendicular to each other.
It defines something.
And while many American christians might claim that reverence of such a symbol would be akin to idolatry, to stomp on a cross in front of a Christian has a meaning and conveys a message and that Christian no matter where they were from would feel a little bit offended by the act.
Americans have symbols. Our country stands for something in our minds. We have ideals we aspire to, and we aspired to them even when we failed horribly, or our founding fathers intended only for straight white men of wealth to vote, or when they pushed Natives out of their land by hook or by crook. Ideas are bullet proof, even when those ideas are a polite fiction if you repeat them often enough people start to believe in them.
They start to believe in them sincerely, they take them to their logical conclusion.
We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal. These words only referred to straight white men of wealth and standing. It did not refer to the poor, or to the illiterate, or to African slaves, or natives, or foreigners. But thats what ended up happening because when we read those words, we dont read 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all straight white landed men of some literacy and standing are created equal'.
So we believe those words with an idealistic naivety disconnected from the context of their creation, and thus they mean something to us, something timeless. Something unifying, and that was the intent behind those words when they were written. The declaration of independence represented ALL the people in the colonies, all who were American or called themselves American. Thus the words became more than just words on a piece of paper. To us, they mean something more.
They are an ideal our forefathers aspired to achieve, and they are an ideal we can also aspire to achieve.
People keep fighting over the house where Hitler was born. Why? its a house, his family only lived there for three years. Yet there is a massive legal battle to demolish it.
Why do you think that is?
Why do you think that in the USA there is a battle to demolish those cheap confederate soldier statues? Why were they even put up in the first place?
Because the house, like the Declaration, like the statues, is more than just an object to some people. Just because you have different symbols to us does not mean that our symbols have no value, or that they are not important to us.
Think of what symbols you have that represent to you what it means to be German, or French or wherever it is you are from. What symbols are important to you, what has meaning in your life?
It doesn't even have to be something as grand as a national symbol. People can have personal things that mean stuff to them.
But for me? The DoI is important, it has meaning, it represents the ideals this nation was founded upon. Ideals we so often failed, or even lived in opposition towards. Yet it is part of the foundational myth of the country and the people. It is wrong to deny its importance, or to just throw it away or hide it. We should not have to live in fear of those who would destroy it for their own cynical purposes. We should be proud of what we are trying to build, we should share it with as many people as possible, to include as many people as possible.
This is not something I can in good conscience hide away as if it were some trinket. We should shout it from the summits and the hillsides and the rooftops. The Declaration of Independence is an idea, and ideas are bullet proof.
I still think there's a difference in how America treats the Liberty Bell or the Old North Church to how an Australian would treat, say, Ned Kelly's Armour? The taxidermied corpse of Duffy or Phar Lap? An original Albert Namatjira? It's actually hard to think of an example because I can think of no artefact, building, or person that my country holds in such worship as Americans seem to do their history.
That just means that you have different symbols regarding what it means to be Australian. They dont have to be tangible objects, not everyone has a Book of Kells, or a liberty bell. Sometimes it could be a folk hero or founding figure or a religion or a ritual or tradition.
Every society is different and has different symbols. But they all have their own symbols. You arent an American, so you do not ascribe the same meaning to American symbols the way Americans do.
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