Burn on the Fourth of July

Evidently some folks are up in arms over how more people are referring to “the Fourth of July” instead of “Independence Day.”  Said protest seems to stem from the idea that date nomenclature somehow assaults our national heritage and the principles for which the date is celebrated.  (I leave it to someone else to determine if these are the same folks who protest
about the “Assault on Christmas”).

 Coincidentally, I was thinking about this the other day, and considering how positive a thing it was, as it prevented the government from turning the holiday into “the First Monday in July” or something.  I go back and forth on the weekday alignment of holidays — it’s a lot more convenient, both as an employer and as an employee (this past four days was very weird, as I was one of the people working on Monday), but it also removes some of the historical charm of the holiday.  As it stands,
only Independence Day, Christmas, and New Years still align to dates, rather than to weekdays.

But I digress.  Language Log (Geoff Nunberg) notes that, actually, references to the date as Independence Day, vs. the Fourth of July are on the upswing, not the other way around (based on text in the New York Times), which makes me think it’s more a matter of (over)sensitivity than anything empirical.  Nunberg also notes that the US, unlike many other countries, tends to eschew
“date” holidays as such.  If you think of it, all we have is “the Fourth of July” — we never talk about “the Twelfth of February” or “the Eleventh of November” or “the Twenty-Fifth of December.”  Granted, as noted, many of these are no longer date-based, but even while they were, we still talked about Veterans Day or Lincoln’s Birthday (and still refer to Christmas).  The closest thing we still have, other than “the Fourth of July,” is the recent “9-11,” which may be just as date-oriented because
of its parallel association with emergency calls.

Finally, Nunberg also observes that this seems to tie in (see “Assault on Christmas,” above) to the culture-war tendency toward being somethinger-than-thou in our society.  One cannot be “just” patriotic — one has to be more patriotic than those you traitorous folks over there. 

But as trivial as the issue is — for now, anyway — it reflects a new, strategically divisive sense of the significance of patriotic symbols. The point of symbols nowadays is not simply to declare one’s devotion to one’s country, but to insist that one loves it more than others did — and hence to turn once universally sanctioned symbols into contested ones. Since the Vietnam era, Peggy Noonan wrote approvingly
a few years ago, wearing a flag in one’s lapel has been “a sign that said ‘I support my country, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad.'”

Hence the curious Lake Woebegon effect in American patriotism: in polls, around 60 percent of Americans describe themselves as more patriotic than the average American, while fewer than 10 percent consider themselves to be less patriotic. Or in other words, most people think that other Americans are less patriotic than they. And what better way to signal one’s own superior patriotism and disparage the patriotism of others than to contest the way
we refer to the Fourth of July — in modern times, the one patriotic symbol that has never been controversial. As one Doc Farmer puts it on the right-wing ChronWatch site:

The date of America’s anniversary may occur on July 4th, but to me, it’s never the Fourth of July. It’s Independence Day… Independence Day is more important to Americans–REAL Americans–than any other “National” holidays…. Independence Day probably means more to me than most “average” Americans.

Which is ironic, given that patriotism would, one think, include love and support of one’s fellow citizens, not a competition to determine who are better nation-loving citizens than others. 

UPDATE: BD links to this post, and to an interesting, semi-tangential Billmon article.