Sick to My Guts

The MC5 — "American Ruse" (1970)

Warning: Political rant ahead. If that’s not your speed, or you’ve already had enough talk of Supreme Court rulings and Presidential debates this week, that’s cool; I’ll be back in a few days with something (hopefully) a little less angry…

I loved the Fourth of July when I was a kid.

Not just the firework displays, the parades and the cookouts (and, during one summer in Michigan, the chainsaw races), though those were all pretty awesome. But as a child who was absolutely obsessed with American history — my main passion way before I fell in love with music or baseball — I was also thrilled to hear people talking on TV and elsewhere about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the various events that led up to it.

The year-plus run-up to the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976 was especially exciting for me, because the American Revolution was a constant topic of conversation and coverage in school and elsewhere. CBS even ran a nightly “Bicentennial Minute” episode, featuring various actors and celebrities recounting a historical event that happened in America “200 years ago today…”

The summer of ‘76, with its three-way collision of baseball, pop culture and Bicentennial fever, left a lasting mark on me — one which eventually led to writing my 2014 book Stars & Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ‘76. By 2014, of course, I was considerably less enamored with the country of my birth than I had been as a ten year-old; but I was nonetheless still in love with the general feeling of “togetherness” that I had experienced during the Bicentennial celebrations.

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It seems so naive to say this now, but at the time it really felt like, “Yeah, our country still has some serious issues — but at least Nixon’s gone, we’re out of Vietnam, we’re not at war anywhere else on the planet, and we’re celebrating all the genuinely great things that this country and its citizens have achieved. We know where we screwed up, we’re all in this together, we’re back in touch with our inner Ben Franklins, and it can only get better from here, right?”

Well, no. Just four years later, an oil crisis, a short recession and an attack on the US Embassy in Iran had us kicking our inner Ben Franklins to the curb and electing the Presidential candidate who fired up our inner John Waynes. But hey, that’s a whole other story…

Still, however ambivalent I may have felt about celebrating our nation’s birthday over the last forty-some years, the Fourth of July has never tasted as weird/bad to me as it does right now.

We’ve got Christo-fascist judges on the Supreme Court (one of whom is married to a woman who put her considerable weight into the attempted overturning of the last Presidential election) implementing a radically conservative agenda that is deeply out of step with the wants and needs of most of this country’s citizens, and who have also just decided that — contrary to everything in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution — a US President is now effectively above the rule of law when it comes to “official acts”. You know, like a king would be, even though the Founding Fathers put their lives on the line 248 years ago to rid this country of tyrannical monarchy. All those much-vaunted “Checks and Balances” they installed against the abuse of presidential power are now, thanks to SCOTUS, basically non-existent.

Which then brings me to the fact that we have a corrupt and compromised convicted felon leading in the presidential polls, one who has made it painfully clear that he will be making full use of the authoritarian powers that the Supreme Court has just granted the presidency — even promising to hold military tribunals against his enemies — should American voters be delusional enough to put him back in the White House.

And then we have the looming specter of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project, which is raring to radically reshape the US government and its policies if and when this particular GOP nominee retakes the Oval Office. By the way, those Heritage Foundation folks are being none too subtle about promising violence if their “second American Revolution” encounters any pushback…

Oh yeah — our sitting President is a career politician who, while decidedly not on the side of fascism, has also not exactly been inspiring confidence of late regarding his continued ability to hit the fastball.

(And please don’t talk to me about RFK Jr. It’s a helluva thing to toss a “protest vote” into the ballot box when the Christo-fascist hordes are quite demonstrably massing at the gates; as any semi-astute reader of history will tell you, fascism is not the sort of thing you can just vote out in the next election if you decide that it maybe isn’t working out for you so well. Also, fuck that guy.)

And this is what The American Experiment comes down to, 248 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Ugh.

I have no answers — hell, I’ve barely been able to pull myself out of bed these last few days — and I have no real idea of what happens next. “Sixty-Nine America, terminal stasis/The air’s so thick it’s like drowning in molasses,” sang the MC5 on their brilliantly incisive 1970 protest rocker “The American Ruse”; and though the American circumstances in 2024 are vastly different than they were in 1969, I definitely feel like I’m drowning in molasses (or maybe just bullshit) right now. At the same time, I’m gonna take a much-needed hit of optimism off the following verse:

But I can see the chickens coming home to roost
Young people everywhere are gonna cook their goose
Lots of kids are working to get rid of these blues
'Cause everybody's sick of the American ruse

I know some people who are seriously talking about leaving the US in the wake of all these disturbing developments — but I’m too broke and too old to flee, I have no really connections/options for residence in other countries, and 99.99 percent of the folks I love most in the world live here. Besides, contrary to what these Trump-humping Bible-thumpers would suggest, this is OUR fucking country, too.

And anyway, it’s still waaay too early to throw up my (or your) hands and sigh, “There’s nothing we can do” about the gathering authoritarian gloom. I’m going to find as many ways as I can to push back against it, and I hope you will, too; after all, that seems far more in line with what Ben Franklin and his fellow Declaration signees had in mind, doesn’t it? Ditto for the MC5 — “Rock ‘em back, Sonic,” indeed.

Oh, and be careful with those firecrackers today — you’re gonna need both of your middle fingers to be fully functional in the coming months. Happy fuckin’ Fourth.

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