Predictably, this morning’s post-4th of July issue of The Kansas City Star had a front-page photo of an adorable kid all decked out in red, white and blue regalia. Inside, reporters Kevin Collison and Laura Uhlmansiek, two poor schlepps who were unfortunately on holiday duty, delivered the required holiday overview – in as clichéd, saccharine and hyper God-bless-America hues as possible. First gag reflex came three paragraphs in: “It was a day when kids wearing red, white and blue were introduced to an American tradition, and adults relaxed and enjoyed the familiar spectacle of marching bands, antique cars and perspiring politicians.”
Collison and Uhlmansiek hit the annual parade in Lenexa; the Village Fest in Prairie Village (where Navy SEALs jumped from a plane); a couple of fireworks displays; and Missouri Town 1855, where they encountered “traditional games and activities, including a watermelon seed-spitting contest, a pie-baking contest and an ice cream social.”
My patriotic moment was a little more real.
About 7:30 in the morning on Independence Day, through the closed-up windows of my air-conditioned house, I heard the strains of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” blaring through the otherwise extremely quiet Volker neighborhood. At first, it sounded as if someone was driving by with a car stereo turned way up. But the music kept playing. We opened the window and listened, awestruck, as we realized someone was actually making a point of playing this acidic version of the national anthem way up loud, first thing in the morning. And as Hendrix’s relatively straightforward guitar rendering of the verses plunged into an anguished, angry objection to everything psychotic that was happening in his country during the Vietnam War, I smiled. Someone else in the neighborhood felt the same kind of patriotism we did and was voicing his objections to the war, to Dick Cheney, to everything that’s keeping us from being the great country that hapless reporters on daily paper assignments pretend we are on the Fourth of July.
Later that night, we tracked down the neighbor and thanked him. He said the stereo blasting of Hendrix was a Fourth of July tradition, but he hadn’t been inspired for the last few years, which is why we hadn’t heard it. We were happy he’d come to his senses. It gave us hope that maybe a lot of other fellow Americans were, too. – C.J. Janovy
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