How Right Wingers See July 4th

     

     No, your prehistoric patriot hasn't lost his mind and fallen head-first into the Qanon rabbit hole. This is an image that was actually posted on Fredo's Twitter account earlier today. Yes, a 40 year-old man and an Executive Vice President of a newly-indicted company put this on his social media account. This is something a 12 year-old would post after getting into his older brother's stash of purple microdot.

     I mean, setting aside the comical disproportion of virtually everything in this image, the giant hats on Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln and a diminished Daddy Warbucks on the back of an eagle that's somehow large and strong enough to achieve liftoff with 300 pounds of 40 years of Big Macs and cellulite on its poor back, this is how right wingers see the 4th of July.

     The eagle is a huge trope in right wing social media, often being endlessly kidnapped and appropriated in avatars and memes, along with Lady Liberty and Old Glory. That would be the Lady Liberty that was given to us by the French surrender monkeys and Chinese-made Walmart American flags that get ditched with redneck alacrity for stars 'n' bars and piss-colored Gadsden flags every time they get riled up over northern elitism like electing someone as president they don't like and travel to the Capitol to overthrow the government.

     And the right wing perception of freedom is as deeply-flawed and selective as that of our Founding Fathers who piously said that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights" and were created equal (provided they weren't black and Native American and that especially went for those who had the wrong genitalia). In fact, they had such an imperfect grasp of what freedom entailed in a democratic republic that it took them 11 more years to draft the Bill of Rights after they'd written the Constitution.

     Nowadays, we think freedom is best expressed in hurtling pyrotechnics into the sky (or inside a truck on a beach in Maryland), gorging on dead animals, swilling brain cell-killing beer (as if they can spare the neurons) and waving a banner that enjoys some selective and conditional popularity.

     But we who understand our history better than most and see it for the deeply-flawed palimpsest that it is see past events and current trends as they truly are while right wingers like Fredo continue to live in an alternate universe. They wear the sunglasses and see the aliens and subliminal propaganda but in reality it isn't there.

     Where we see boring Democratic politicians, they see Satan-worshiping cannibal pedophiles. Where we see Critical Race Theory being taught in graduate-level law schools they see as kindergarten-level racist indoctrination that teaches little black kids to hate white people. Where we see legitimate elections, they see as a massive conspiracy involving millions of voters and elections officials all working in tandem across our patchwork, crazy quilt warren of election laws to illegitimately elect Joe Biden as president. Whereas we see a pandemic that in less than a year and a half had killed as many Americans as the four year-long Civil War, they see as a "Democrat hoax".

    

     Actually, just to cozy up a bit closer to the truth, this is a more accurate picture of Trump's relationship with eagles as well as a concise image perfectly summing up the results of Election Night 2020.

     I could go on and on but I'm sure you get the message. We simply live in two realities and those who can think for themselves, do. Those who are content to let right wing politicians and hyper-partisan meatheads on Fox do their thinking for them, let them. And, unfortunately, we are a species, and always will be a species, in which perception is everything.

     This is how we get these comically-warped perceptions and images of what Independence Day actually means. Independence and freedom were doled out over a period of nearly 250 years, with wealthy, white assholes bellying up at the head of the line. Then it was African Americans, Native Americans, women, LGBT people but even that's conditional to this day. Freedom since 1776 was doled out in an installment plan.

     Say what you want about the Founding Fathers. They had a shitty and imperfect grasp of what freedom was and who should get it. But they eventually corrected and got some of it right. But those who came afterwards?

     Well, this is what we get when the country and half its people don't read history books.

     Or any books, for that matter.