June 28, 2011

Fourth of July without fireworks? What kind of America is it when people can’t blow shit up and recklessly endanger themselves and their neighbors? How can we have special memories of the birth of our nation if we can’t marry them with the memory of a cousin running into the house with a charred eyeball hanging out of its socket? Such graphic and disturbing mental images remind us of the sacrifices Americans made in the defense of freedom. Freedom always comes at a cost, so it only makes sense that celebrating freedom would involve some collateral damage as well. Remember how old Uncle Jumpy used to freak out and duck for cover whenever you lit a string of Black Cats at a family Fourth of July celebration? Hilarious! Well, at least until you got older and found out he spent most of the spring of ’68 at Khe Sanh dodging mortar rounds. Until then you just thought he was a crazy, pissed-off old alcoholic who chain-smoked Marlboros and wore a huge folding knife in a camo pouch on his belt. To him, the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air were more than just pretty poetic imagery in the National Anthem. Of course, that still didn’t keep you from having bottle-rocket fights with the neighbors across the street or Roman candle duels with your cousins in the backyard. In retrospect, that shit seems pretty stupid, but maybe on a larger scale stupidity is every bit as important as intelligence. Any dinosaur could tell you (were its brain not the size of a walnut) that Darwinism is a painfully slow process. Design changes take millions of years. Things that seem brutish and imbecilic in their current context (like bottle-rocket fights) may be essential to the evolution of mankind. Sure, you would have to be one dumbass giant ground sloth to just wade into the La Brea Tar Pits, but at least if you did you could be comforted by the thought that thousands of other dumbasses got mired in the same muck. In fact, you can safely bet that if the tar pits weren’t fenced off, the city of Los Angeles would still be fishing tarred (‘tarded?) dumbasses out of them every day. No doubt the fencing is good for public safety, but it’s also undermining the process of natural selection and putting a serious gap in the fossil record of dumbasses. Perhaps the irony of L.A. being home to one of the largest, smelliest, oozing monuments to stupidity in the world was not lost on city leaders. Fencing it off might have seemed like the smartest thing to do, but in the end, they’re only further slowing the glacial progress of evolution. Fireworks bans work much the same way, but don’t get impatient. Wars have been going on for thousands of years, and humans haven’t evolved much toward peace. Rather, we’ve evolved toward more efficient ways to kill one another. Case in point: gunpowder. You won’t smell much of it on Monday – at least in Austin – but you’ll be safer for it. Sadly, not only is the fireworks display canceled; you won’t even get a chance to heckle the Austin Symphony. Apparently the 1812 Overture just doesn’t work without live ordnance. So, it seems we won’t be celebrating freedom at all here in Austin. Thank God then for Red, White ‘n Buda, which takes place July 4 in the “Outdoor Capital of Texas,” just a few minutes down the interstate. All day at Buda City Park, they’re soldiering on with festivities that don’t involve incendiaries. Drive down early for the children’s parade at 10am, or wait until it cools off at 6pm and enjoy a musical lineup that includes Keith Kelso, Kevin Smith, and the Trishas. Is this as good as it gets? Don’t be stupid. It is, however, as good as we’ve got.