Independence Day in the Roberts’ Court Era
by David Rakoff
I’ve been thinking about how literally lovely is the Fourth of July. Sentiment and aesthetic aligned almost perfectly. Think about it. How fortunate we are in the colors of the flag of our republic, that they should find themselves echoed and reverberating out into the very things we hold dear: the white of fence pickets around the yards of good neighbors; the red of local fire trucks, polished to a gleaming fare-thee-well and leading small town parades; the indigo of New England blueberries, so conveniently abundant at the time of celebration, so happily baked into pies. See? Pretty! Even in New York City, where the palette of the holiday is necessarily darker—predominantly the black of rooftop 
tarpaper and the deep, jewel-like greens and browns of beer bottles—it remains a day of beauty, thanks to the Gershwin-scored perfection that are the fireworks blooming above the skyline.
Some twenty years back, I stood with my friends Amy and Julia on a Village rooftop some dozen or more stories above street level. The bursts seemed just over our heads. At any moment, it seemed, an errant ember might hurtle towards us—its descent having done nothing to cool off its internal flame—and pass through my body as easily as a super-heated knife might through the most innocent stick of defenseless butter. No one would notice before it was too late, the smell of my incinerated flesh mingling with the roasting hotdog aromas on other rooftops (what are we, after all, but creatures of meat?). It wasn’t that farfetched. Every year, newspapers ran stories about some poor honors student with her whole life ahead of her meeting just such a fate. (My friends and I joked about the Gruccis, New York’s preeminent fireworks family, having to subsist on sandwiches, the only food they could clasp between the fleshy clubs they had after they’d blasted off their collective digits.) Fireworks were serious business for something so fun, but these all felt too close and extra dangerous.
“What’s wrong?” asked Julia, noticing my joyless grimace.
“I don’t know. They make me feel small, I guess.”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “ You are small.”
I laughed, because it was funny; and it was funny because it was true. This was during the many years, essentially two decades’ worth, that I lived in the U.S., studying, working, paying taxes, owning property, attending protests, and engaging in all the activities of a civic life minus the final sacrament of citizenship. I was exactly as small as she said. Voteless. Voiceless. Negligible.
Finally in 2003, twenty-one years after my arrival on these shores from Canada, I became an American, at an induction ceremony among hundreds of others, our faces every imaginable hue and ethnicity. Here again, outer attributes were the beautiful expression of the underlying sentiments of Emma Lazarus’ words. It wasn’t July Fourth, but it might as well have been. I cried when we sang the national anthem.
I’ve written as much elsewhere (most notably in my second book, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, on sale wherever fine volumes and flavored coffees are sold (don’t judge me too harshly; along with jazz, is not self-promotion the quintessential American art form?), but I took citizenship, because I had stopped feeling safe here with just a green card, an insecurity born of the shoot-now-ask-questions-later bluntness of the Patriot Act, of unauthorized surveillance upon citizens, of enhanced interrogation techniques, all carried out in the name of a war declared and fought based on false intelligence and disinformation, waged by a president installed by a Supreme Court that saw fit to suspend the recount. Even when my first exercising of the greatest privilege accorded to citizens was to vote for the less-than-thrilling John Kerry (an anti-climax akin to blowing all of one’s frequent flier miles on a first class trip to Grand Rapids), I thought a passport would make me feel secure, and that things would get no worse. That at the very least I counted.
Who knew that a judiciary that unilaterally anointed a monarch would seem Geneva Convention-quaint compared to the current body, now helmed by a young man whose opinions and judgments are marked by a reverence for entrenched power and money so consistently heartless and unwavering that, were it not so terrifying in its decades-long ramifications, would—if one could just stop crying—border on the comical? (It is already firmly encamped in the surreal given that Chief Justice Roberts is the most un-July 4th of people: his physical attributes so diametrically belying his intentions. Here is a man with the blue eyes and enviable good hair and jaw-line of a Mr. Smith gone to Washington, but who conducts himself like the kind of foreclose-an-orphanage-on-Christmas-Eve villain that might even cause a ham-fisted propagandist like Frank Capra to throw up his hands with an incredulous “Oh, come on!”).
As I write, Senator Robert Byrd’s coffin lies in state in the senate chamber. Justice Stevens’ last day on the bench was spent in fruitless dissent of a ruling that has made guns now officially easier to buy than antihistamines, and it’s Week One of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings. There are some legitimate areas of concern regarding her résumé and lack of judicial experience that are worthy of interrogation, to be sure. It is an important job. But GOP chairman Michael Steele and the Republican senators have floated their talking points out to the commentariat by choosing, of all things, to make hay out of Kagan’s clerkship for Thurgood Marshall, painting our first black Supreme Court Justice as a Constitution-dissing judicial activist. I’ve no doubt that Marshall, being human, had his flaws, but this just reminds me of the joke that was going around during the Satanic Verses fatwah: “Have you heard the title of Salman Rushdie’s new book? It’s called The Life of Buddha, That Stupid, Fat Fuck.”
The joke is my gift to you. You’re going to need it to get through the next few years. As for matters closer at hand, like the past weekend, I have no gags and no advice. I didn't watch the fireworks this year. The friend with the good roof access has moved away and the downturn in the economy has seriously curtailed the profusion—from the Village one used to be able to enjoy dueling riots of color on both rivers, as well as other constellations near Staten Island and somewhere over New Jersey. That’s all changed. I didn't feel much like celebrating this gorgeous mosaic of diverse individuals. You know, post-Citizens United “individuals” like Nothrop Grumman and Exxon-Mobil. Besides, a commemoration of my insignificance, my own voice bullied into silence, hardly needs its own fiery display. Now that just looks like any other day.
David Rakoff’s most recent book is Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems. His forthcoming book, Half Empty, publishes in September.