(July 4) Independence Day is such a favorite holiday of mine that when this nation had its bicentennial celebration in 1976, I told my father I wanted to live to 112 so I could see the tricentennial.
Still, there was one Fourth of July I couldn’t celebrate with friends or fireworks. As a cub sports reporter for this newspaper in 1986, I was assigned to cover the Golden Meadow Tarpon Rodeo — a really great event for participants, but awful for a reporter (at least back then). My job involved waiting in the blazing heat, in an outside walkway at Golden Meadow Junior High School, for tired anglers to drive up with their fish in the backs of pickup trucks, eager to get the catch weighed and then move on.
With no air conditioning, not enough coins for the vending machines and sometimes long periods between trucks, all I could do was sweat in the heat as I read my book. Fortunately, it was one of the best novels I’ve ever read, “All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren. Brilliantly written, utterly engrossing, it nonetheless was full of dark and tragic undertones of a side of politics I had never really experienced in person.
Essentially a fictionalized version of the career of (in)famous Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long, the Penn Warren masterpiece is, alas, oft-remembered for perhaps its most downbeat passage: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.”
As much as I was enraptured by the novel, this was hardly a welcome theme about American politics for an idealistic 22-year-old on the Fourth of July. (To say the least!)
As someone who expected to spend my career either working in or writing about politics, it left me wary. Was this really what I was getting into?
Well, in the 39 years since then, I’ve seen far more than I want to see of the rotten underside of some politics. Still, that’s not the full story. Instead, I’ve seen plenty of validation of the idealism the Fourth of July always inspires — the idealism asserting that this American system is almost miraculously wise in conception, and that it can create the conditions for ennobling actions…. [The full column is at this link.]
