If buttercups buzz'd after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way 'round,
Then all the world would be upside down.
--"The World Turned Up-side Down"
When Cromwell ruled the island, he and his Puritans didn't exactly cancel Christmas, but they did their best. They believed Christmas festivals served only to waste resources and encourage immoral activity. They even had a practice of confiscating food if they believed it would be used in celebration.
Christmas, the English Puritans decided, would be spent in quiet contemplation. (Somebody once said that the Puritans didn't put up with bear baiting, either. Not because it gave great pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.)
During one of the Christmases of the 1640s, the song "The World Turned Up-side Down" made its way across the isle in response to the new anti-celebration laws from the Lord Protector. Legend has it, and maybe only legend, that the song was played years later while the redcoats laid down their arms at Yorktown.
Americans could sing it again today. If we only knew how it went.
Pops on the River is canceled. There won't be a block party (or shouldn't be) tonight. There will be no baseball at the park. There will be no parades. Nobody is going to go get Nana from the nursing home so she can enjoy the fireworks and ice cream, too. The papers are filling up with cancellations of holiday festivities.
The world has turned upside down.
This was supposed to be the day, in John Adams' words, to be "celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."
According to John Adams, even shews, games and sports were to be solemnized. NB: He was a Puritan, too.
It's easy to be uneasy these days. This virus has everybody on edge. For good reason. Few people have seen anything like this. And for those who have, such as immunologists and epidemiologists, they have a saying: Once you've seen one pandemic, you've seen one pandemic.
Nobody really knows what August will look like. Or if we'll have football in September. Speaking of holidays, nobody knows what Thanksgiving will be like, or if Christmas will be celebrated according to Cromwell's rules.
But it doesn't take a crowd to celebrate. Nobody said there have to be 1,000 people at a birthday party. And today is an important birthday.
Imagine a country founded on the idea that We the People had a right to pursue happiness. Can you imagine the Germans or Brits or even the French coming up with such a phrase in the constituting document of their nation?
But all these years later, the words of America's founding document still sound, like a trumpet: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness ... .
The pursuit of Happiness, and capitalized at that! We suppose that there are a great many nations on this planet that consider themselves exceptional. And might even deserve to. Greece, Italy, Egypt, Israel. They can hold a claim to exceptionalism, even if a few of them have to rely on ancient peoples and civilizations to do so. But none of them, in our knowledge, can claim the pursuit of happiness as a reason for being.
Not the guarantee of happiness, mind you. But Americans can pursue it, for the most part, as long as we don't get in anybody else's way. What a country.
Besides shews, sports, and illuminations, you know what also makes Americans happy?
Miracles.
When the Founding Fathers of America decided to create a new nation by declaring independence on July 4, 1776, their ideas were unprecedented, even considered radical in Europe. All major European nations were still ruled by kings, including King George in England, King Louis XVI in France, and King Charles III in Spain. Lands that would become Austria and Hungary were ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Germany and Italy were not yet nations, but they were ruled in an autocratic way by various princes over various provinces. The very idea of democracy, a republic allowing people to elect their own representatives, and the freedoms that became the Bill of Rights, all of that was new. It was as much a new idea as a new nation. When you hear people today say America is an idea, it makes more sense when you consider the rest of the World in 1776.
After the Declaration, the real work of putting this nation together began. And the pursuit of happiness was anything but happy. The founders, and not just the founders, knew that before America could become the United States, a war had to be fought. The pursuit of happiness sometimes means delaying it.
Is history just luck? Or something else? Consider just one incident/miracle: In order to hold off the redcoats, a rebel general named George Washington planned to defend a high point in New York City known as Breucklyn. (We spell it differently today.)
After the first day's fighting out on Long Island, the British inexplicably called a halt while the Americans were engaging in a classic maneuver technically known in exalted military terms as a dead run in the opposite direction. With Washington's forces split between Long Island and New York City, his position was a defeat waiting to happen. Heck, it had already happened.
But it could have turned into the collapse of a whole nascent nation. For would Congress continue the fight with the Army scattering? Washington finally ordered a full retreat into a more defensible location. But would his troops have time to get off Long Island?
(Flashes of lightning and roars of thunder.)
A storm put off another round of fighting. Night fell. A wind blew the British fleet to sea. Then, as dawn broke, a heavy fog covered Washington's retreat.
And the continental army lived to retreat another day.
Miracles tended to happen with some frequency during the American Revolution, which would be known today as the American revolution, small caps, if the Brits could have come ashore that day.
Besides divine intervention, how explain the army's surviving at Valley Forge, or the surprise at Trenton, or the hurricanes and drought that forced Spain into trading with the rebels, giving us much needed supplies and ammo? How did Henry Knox get all that artillery to Boston?
It's as though Providence wanted to give the Americans the opportunity to pursue happiness, eventually. We certainly think of it that way.
There are other ways to look at the Fourth of July. Without a brutal war, in and among our families and neighborhoods, the holiday would never be marked. And the founders had their own flaws. As did the Constitution they drew up.
But today, July Fourth, we're going to concentrate on that pursuit of happiness. Or as Thomas Jefferson put it, the pursuit of Happiness. Today, who cares about AP style and the proper capitalization of nouns? We're pursuing here.
Cheers, fellow Americans. Until the world is backside up again.