L. Neil Smith looks back at Independence Day

A bit late for the US holiday weekend, but still worth reading . . . L. Neil Smith:

Thirty-one years ago, in 1977, in what turned out to be my first novel, The Probability Broach, I asked a rhetorical question about the nation's Independence day, the Fourth of July: "What was left to celebrate?"

Even then, long before September 1, 2001, Homeland Security, Abu Graib, and Guantanamo (in those days, it was just a navy base), it was clear to me that what America's Founding Fathers had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to create was being destroyed, at a faster and faster rate each year, by those to whom the very notion of individuals at liberty to control their own lives is a nightmare straight out of hell.

The holiday itself presents all the evidence one needs to reach a conclusion like that. Then, as now, if you attempt to enjoy it in the manner traditional to our ancestors, heavily-armed uniformed thugs will show up on your doorstep, steal your fireworks (which they'll shoot off later, behind the station house, when they think nobody is looking), and if you tell them to go where they belong, they'll smash down your door, Taser you into convulsions, beat you up, and haul you away.

Or kill you.

For your own safety.

Happy Independence Day.

If you were to "shoot the anvil" — by placing a charge of black gunpowder beneath it and setting it off, sending the anvil a dozen or more feet into the air — they'd soil themselves, and then call in an airstrike.

You are perfectly welcome to celebrate freedom, as long as you do it in chains. TV and radio nags, most of them government-empowered one way or another, spoil the day for weeks in advance by preaching over and over that "you'll shoot your eye out" if you try to enjoy your own fireworks, and that everything else you might happen to love about the day — especially your Fourth of July barbecue — will give you a heart attack, cancer, or (despite the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom from religion) somehow despoil and offend the Earth Mother Goddess.