Spirit of Rebellion 2022

If you click on the black flag on the sidebar, you'll be taken to one of my favorite things I've ever written, an Independence Day post called The Spirit of Rebellion. It is originally from 2015, and ties together a  number of historical trends -- including the recently-mentioned Robert the Bruce and the War of Scottish Independence -- that brought us to our American nation. The Declaration of Independence is the root of our tradition, its principles having survived the Articles of Confederation and the establishment of the Constitution, and those eternal principles shall survive the Constitution when it finally falls. Yet these even older things are the seed from which the root sprang, and we are wise to remember the deep history.

This year the spirit of rebellion is being seen mostly on the left, surprisingly since the Democratic Party controls all the Federal levers of electoral government. The loss of the Supreme Court, which was for so long their method of amending the Constitution without the bother of obtaining a three-quarters majority of states' consent, has been hugely upsetting. Yet according to this poll, up to a quarter of Americans are nearly ready to take up arms against the government, and spread across the political spectrum (one in three each of Republicans and Independents, one in five Democrats). 

Ironically, only about a third of those declaring for war are currently gun owners. The long feared militia movement is not going to be the source of revolution; if it occurs, it is likely to be a combination of abortion supporters on the left and those among the general citizenry horrified by the corruption they can witness in the government and its allied elites: a majority of all voters say the system is corrupt and rigged against ordinary people, and 49% say they have come to feel like strangers in their own country. 

It would be wise to remember the closing point of the Independence Day essay.


Maybe we can pick a nice day in mid-October, when the weather will be excellent for the celebratory cookouts that mark it. I understand the former Columbus Day has opened up as a holiday, but any of the days nearby it are usually excellent.

And for anyone reading this who might occupy a position of power: beware. You tread on thin ice with very many political factions among the citizenry, and you will be judged by those eternal principles in the Declaration. If you fail that test, you will not be missed: rather, your fall will be toasted for centuries to come.

Happy Independence Day.
on

5 comments:

  1. Dad299:12 AM

    When in the course of human events.........

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12:31 PM

    There was a meme that you posted some years back about fireworks representing bombs exploding and that we should keep it in mind while eating our Fourth of July picnic...... or something like that...... and I was searching for that me and because it’s stuck in my mind and I can’t find it by using the term Fourth of July or bombs or fireworks on your search function

    Perhaps you could help by resurrecting that old meme?

    Greg

    ReplyDelete
  3. Grim1:54 PM

    Sure, that's easy enough. I have all those old memes on my hard drive in a folder marked "Americana."

    D29 was pointing out to me the other day that this blog is nearly un-findable on major search engines. The archives are nearly unsearchable too: even if I know the exact phrase I want, Google will usually provide no results and I have to just go crawling through it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. james4:35 PM

    I worked up a way of searching my old blog posts on my personal machine, but that doesn't help anybody else (https://idontknowbut.blogspot.com/2022/04/searching-my-own-blog.html)

    If google doesn't want to index blogs, then posts will only show up haphazardly when other people search the net, and there's nothing much I can do about that. I can see why google might not want to--most blogs only provide noise for my searches, though some provided the gold I was looking for.

    However, if someone wants specifically to search _my_ blog, that's at least potentially doable. Google offers cloud instances of databases, but I don't know how much their current or future cost will be--they can change rules at their pleasure. I don't fancy trying to automate tools to update a cloud database and parse out search terms. Google will happily sell you the tools to manage that.

    Another possibility is to create a world-readable google spreadsheet that people could search. My blog, after trimming out a lot of the HTML cruft, is only about 9MB (without pictures), which wouldn't be too hard to search. Yours is bigger.

    Ideally google would index its blogs (which could be almost automatic for them) and then have a radio button on the search index page that says "search blogs too."

    ReplyDelete
  5. Grim5:44 PM

    Thank you, James. You're right, of course: I could download the whole thing as an XML file from Blogger, and it would be fairly simple to Ctrl-F search for a word or phrase.

    ReplyDelete