Conclusion
Sorry then, but securing the liberty of all the people was hardly the true and driving motive of the American Revolutionary War. It was more of an instinctive motivational maneuver to galvanize popular support than a genuine motive. Sadly, the myth reconsecrated and reinforced every Fourth of July, the myth of enlightened exponents and progressive paladins of democracy taking up the noble crusade for the rights and freedom of man is just that, a venerable mythic motif.
Certainly, just as with theological fables, our public holidays perform the function of hallowing and imparting the lore of this nation’s “civil religion”, of the belief system that acculturates Americans to their national identity, and to a patriotic acceptance of the underlyingly plutocratic politico-economic hierarchy of their society. This country’s Independence Day is of course the secular High Holy Day on the U.S. calendar, the mother of all three day weekends for ritually-festively observing the romanticized, storied, mythopoetic narrative of American history and politics.
The unworthy-of-legend truth of the American Revolution, however, is that it was little more than a bourgeois power play whose political-historical legacy has been the structural, if unofficial, sovereignty not of the people, but of men of commerce and finance and capital. Not a bona fide democracy, but a “benevolent” dictatorship of the capitalist plutotariat, this is the sham system that the main characters of our society’s creation story have saddled us with, what quaint old Ben Franklin, valiant Georgie Porgie Washington, and the sage of Monticello, and company, have deformed the beautiful ideal of self-government into.
When we observe the Fourth of July, in our own small way we perpetuate a gullible faith in the mythic big lie that the heroes of the Revolution did something more than establish a constitutional businessocracy, that they were heaven-sent patriarchs of the land of the free and the home of the brave, bestowing the blessings of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Until we cease to cooperate with such smarmy historical flimflam, until we begin to choose hard facts over pious fictions, until we stoutly reject the sanctified premises of our catechistic holidays, we’ll remain deeply and vulnerably stuck in the undemocratic cycles set in motion by the founding frauds of our system, undemocratic cycles of being manipulated, screwed, and increasingly peonized by a ruling class that officially doesn’t exist.
