The Schlock Heard 'Round the World

THE AGENDA for the Bicentennial is now becoming clear. President Ford's pilgrimage to Boston's Old North Church to Concord's Minuteman Statue, and to Lexington's Green was certainly only the first of a series of flash visits that will commemorate the valiant efforts of the hard-working colonial farmers who left their small plots to fight for independence from the British. As April turns into May and June and the hot days of summer, the executive caravan will follow its pompish route through the cities and towns of the Eastern Seaboard, invoking the heroic patriotism and noble sacrifice of Bunker Hill. Dorchester Heights, Long Island and other sites where red-coats and colonists clashed.

"Tonight we bow our heads in memory of those who gave their lives, limbs and property for us during that historic struggle." President Ford will proclaim over and over again as he did Friday night in Boston, taking care to get correct the name of the battle site and the heroes involved. "Let us be true to ourselves--to our heritage and our homeland--and we will never then be false to any people or nation," he will conclude as he did in the pulpit of Old North Church, and then the whole string of motorcars, mobile kitchens, security units, press cars, and speechwriters vans will once again grind into motion, moving to its rendezvous with historical fact at the next town down the road.

And like the words of Ford's speeches, the path of this patriotic parade will undergo little alteration, passing the same Howard Johnsons, the same laundromats, the same Golden Arches, the same car washes and supermarkets and bowling alleys. Through Massachusetts and Rhode Island, through Connecticut and into New York, the celebration of our nation's birth will succumb to the same contradictions that so numbed the initial ceremonies. Echoes of the shot heard round the world will become lost in the tumult of cats speeding by as housewives do their week's shopping and couples go to the movies. The gleam from the lanterns, terrestial if one and aquatic if two, will pale in the neon of shop displays and the glare of crime lights. The trotting of the horse on its way to alert the militia-men loses its way in the labyrinthine confusion of modern urban streets. At a time when the Tea Party becomes a subject for T-shirts and when drinking mugs are emblazoned with the faces of our favorite patriots the appeal to the great ideals that created our country" is as un congruous as it is predictable.

YET BEYOND this contrast of message and milieu, the opening of the Bicentennial celebration was marked by a more serious confusion of historical interpretation and present purpose. "The two lanterns of the Old North Church have fired a torch of freedom that has been carried to the ends of the earth," was Ford's metaphor for the action that marked the start of the colonists revolution, and throughout his speech the president revealed that it was more the torch than the freedom that he found inspiring. The blood of the Civil War, the corpse-ridden trenches of the First World War and the seared flesh of the Second, the stand-off of the Cold War, and the carrion of Korea--these are the events Ford cited as evidence of the ongoing fulfillment of the American dream enunciated by patriots aspiring to throw off the yoke of British oppression.

A less serious but no less saddening confusion marked last weekend's counter-Bicentennial. The thousands who shouted slogans outside the Old North Church while Ford spoke inside divided their anger over a variety of issues, from support for Israel to opposition to aid for Turkey to venom at busing in Boston. The crowd of 30,000 braving the wet chill night in Concord was gathered for the ostensible purpose of "sending a message to Wall Street" in protest of big business. But it was clear from the carefreeness of the crowd that they were more interested in listening to favorites by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie than in making any political statement beyond proclaiming their celebration an embodiment of the "true" spirit of the Revolution.

Somehow the attempt to wrap the leaders of the Revolutionary War in radical garb seemed a bit forced. Post-World War II history has conditioned Americans to think of men like John Adams and Patrick Henry as politically stodgy as they appear in pictures in American history books, with their long powdered wigs and tight-fitting puritanical breeches. Our image of Thomas Jefferson, with his dreams of a nation of enlightened yeomen, is sullied by the picture of Lyndon Johnson sending B-52s to bomb the peasants of North Vietnam. The thought of Samuel Adams, fervently orating on the imperative of American independence, becomes confounded with the image of American leaders like Dwight Eisenhower sending troops to Korea.

Such a deflation of a revolution's spirit is not inevitable, as the American case might lead one to believe, in France, for instance, the example of 1789 proved alive enough in 1968 to inspire another generation clashing with a modern-day ancien regime. As they marched through the streets of Paris, the students of the Sorbonne and the workers of the Renault factory were confident that they acted in the tradition of the sans-culottes who sparked the overthrow of feudalism's decaying bulk. In Mexico, too, peasants and workers still hope for the fulfillment of the revolution that engulfed their nation over 50 years ago. In the streets of Mexico City and on the walls of village houses, the angry visage of Zapata serves as a flashing warning to those who would go too far in hetraying the struggle that witnessed the shedding of so much blood.

IN THIS country, the most honored enshrinement a Revolutionary leader can hope for is to have a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike named after him. "Exit 12--Benjamin Franklin Rest Area," the tribute would read, and as we drive in to have our HoJo Cola we give thanks to men like the Pennsylvania patriot whose crucial historical role guaranteed to a future generation the convenience of easy on, easy-off roadside concessions. And such a memorial would well suit the way in which our leaders today conceive the role of the Founding Fathers. In Ford's words last Friday, 200 years ago there began a struggle that established our liberty a liberty both economic in its promise of a buck to those who can earn it and spiritual in its assurance of privacy to all who can accumulate enough to build a house in the suburbs.

What Ford failed to realize is that his call for "unity of purpose" as a means of furthering the Revolutionary tradition will not find sympathetic ears among those who produce James Otis lunch boxes or manufacture Patrick Henry book bags. Patriotism has never been founded on the "individualism," private enterprise, and "frontier spirit" that Ford invoked in his speech. He failed to understand that it was not to the politicians, business leaders, and social patriarchs inside Old North Church that he should have appealed for fulfillment of his vision of the American dream. The real American patriots, though they wouldn't have admitted it, were marching outside and gathering in Concord. It was they who, chaotic as their demands were, would have responded enthusiastically to a call for the same unity of purpose that cemented the colonists in their fight against England. They are the ones who would have heaped adulation on the president if--instead of intoning the virtues of producing at home and bringing liberty to the world--he had stepped out of his pulpit, walked out of the church, taken a megaphone in hand and preached a different message of the American Revolution.

Enough of this nonsense about torches of liberty and frontier spirit, he would shout to the crowd. And enough of this guerilla-theater message-to-Wall-Street crap. I ask you all to act with the zeal of civic sacrifice that was so noble among the men and women of this nation in the throes of its birth. Starting tomorrow I am drafting all Americans between the ages of 21 and 30 into a civil militia. For one year each of you will serve the nation without pay, in some public service capacity. You will have a broad selection of opportunities--legal and, day care, food programs, construction, medical aid. The only requirement is that you fight for the nation with the same tenacity that your forefathers did. May God be with you.

AND WITH that he would, with the wave of his hand, dismiss his motley retinue of sportcoated sycophants of patriotism and call for his horse, which he would mount and ride to Washington like a true Revolutionary leader, where he would call off the remainder of the Bicentennial celebration and get down to the business of the nation's next 200 years.