1775

As the Bicentennial celebration leads us to remember the events of April, 1775, it is important that we do not forget more recent Aprils. In April 1965 President Johnson stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam, and the following April the U.S. used B-52 bombers for the first time to wreak massive and arbitrary destruction on the North. And only five years ago in April, 1970 President Nixon initiated the U.S. incursion into Cambodia. This April, too, each week brings fresh evidence--trivial or crucial, comic or tragic--of the continuing strength the most shameful strands in American history. As the country refers to old slogans about taxation without representation, it learns of an Internal Revenue Service training school that plied undercover agents with liquor and women, 'objects' it evidently regarded as equally dangerous. As the country reads about colonial resentment at British monopolies, 70,000 unemployed workers from General Motors, one of the largest of its monopolies, wait for their unemployment checks to stop coming. And as President Ford praises the embattled Concord farmers who fired the shot heard round the world, similarly embattled farmers of Indochina--who, like their Concord predecessors, fight the world's strongest power as well as local people loyal to a colonial government or to old ways--continue to meet all the resistance Ford can muster against them.

Such contradictions are not new. They were present in the American republic from its inception. The young United States that slaughtered its native inhabitants, enslaved its imported ones, and enfranchised mostly property-owners was hardly unequivocally committed to the equality it began by proclaiming self-evident. But neither this fact nor the Bicentennial's official perversion should obscure its significance. The Bicentennial is a reminder of an event that--like the Vietnamese revolution today--turned the world upside down, laying a mighty country low and bringing power closer to a small country's ordinary people. It is no accident that Ho Chi Minh should have turned, when writing his own country's declaration of independence in 1945, to the American Declaration of Independence as a rhetorical model; for its radical vision continues to challenge official platitudes and complacency, and to remind the challengers that they have a long history behind them.

But the rhetoric of the Bicentennial serves quite a different purpose for this country's government than it did for Ho Chi Minh. Instead of glorifying a new struggle, it serves to parody an old one, with a trumped-up consensus which conceals real inequality and conflict. One way to repudiate this attempt at a false consensus is through demonstrations, like the one the People's Bicentennial Commission has called for this Friday night. The Commission's plan for a midnight-to-draw vigil at Concord was unnecessarily theatrical, and its planners' emphasis on vogue phrases about "economic independence," or sending "Wall Street" an unspecified "message," isn't much help either. The revolutionaries whose language the Commission takes over wholesale weren't just stealing phrases--they were reacting to their time's problems and responding to their country's contemporary, specific situation. Today, too, withdrawal from Indochina would mean more. But it is important that Ford's visit to New England not go unopposed. After all, history didn't stop in 1775.