Conscious Choice: Summer Celebrations

July 2000 | Citizen at Large

Summer Celebrations

by Jay Walljasper

It’s the longest day of the year, and although I’m indoors at my desk, I can see and smell and hear the joyous evidence of summertime. Brilliant blue skies beckon right outside my window. Fragrances sail up from the garden. Birds gleefully call and children, including my five-year-old son Soren, playfully holler. At midsummer in the Midwest, all of nature seems to be making busy preparations for a gala festival.

Julie and I have invited friends over for a platter of pasta and bottle of locally-made wine tonight in our backyard. As the sky darkens at the luxuriously late hour of ten (what Soren calls "the blue going out and the black coming in"), we will put down our forks, raise our glasses, and — invoking the midsummer rites of our Celtic, Norse, and Tuetonic forebears — toast the cycles of nature and the magic of this time of year.

When we observe the winter solstice six months from now it’s likely to be eighty degrees colder. That’s why I find it odd that there’s so little public acknowledgment of this amazing point in the year’s calendar, especially in a place like the Midwest where winter lingers for almost five months. A few people I know, the ones most likely to read Conscious Choice, will host solstice parties tonight. But for the vast majority of Americans midsummer holds no special significance.

The big summer holiday here is the Fourth of July, a day devoted to parades, picnics, and fireworks. It’s usually a lot of fun and I greatly enjoy eating potato salad and drinking beer in my backyard before scanning the twilight skies for explosions of color. In many ways the Fourth of July fills in for midsummer, giving us a chance to set aside our chores and break out from the measured norms of everyday life. Parties go on way past the usual hours and firecrackers bang, bang, bang all night long.

Yet, apart from an occasion for festivities themselves, what’s being celebrated is patriotism, nationalism, and — sometimes — militarism. Looking back on the Fourth of July parade in my hometown of Urbana, Illinois, I fondly recall the hand-decorated floats and flashy African-American drum-and-bugle corps, but blanch at the memory of trucks mounted with missiles from the nearby Chanute Air Force base rolling down the street to enthusiastic cheers. My point is not to make another attack on American imperialism (although there is some irony in how we mark our independence from the British empire by extolling the might of our own empire) but to offer a different thought. I find it curious that we ignore midsummer, which is an event rooted in nature itself, in favor of the Fourth of July, which is simply a date on the calendar. Midsummer happens each and every year — even if you didn’t know the date you would know it was midsummer by the sun’s endurance in the west skies and the accompanying frenzy in the plant and animal worlds. The Fourth of July is just an abstract event — the anniversary of something that happened two hundred twenty-one years ago. In fact not even that, since, according to author Bill Bryson, the Declaration of Independence was formally approved on July 2 and the actual signing of the document did not begin until August 2. Nothing seems actually to have happened on the fourth.

But America is a nation that has always been defined by abstractions; we lack the long sweep of common history, inhabitation of land over countless generations, customs and culture forged through the centuries, or blood ties. It’s not exactly clear what it means to be American, in the way that Danes or Japanese or Kurds understand their identity. That explains how words penned on a piece of parchment two centuries ago have come to loom so large in our consciousness. But words, even inspiring ones about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," are not enough to hold together a nation. This is why America sometimes seems so unsure of its place in the world, and so inclined to reduce its national essence to a certain set of economic beliefs or its military prowess.

For most of this century we have done a better of job of explaining what we are not — Communist — than what we are. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, a debate has gone on about what is American about America. Conservatives point to our military power. Liberals celebrate our multicultural history. Fundamentalists preach the Christian foundations of our culture. Environmentalists point to the bounty of our land. Corporate leaders stress the individual pursuit of wealth that’s shaped our economy. At this point, it looks like the economic definition of what America is seems to be prevailing. Before an international economic summit a few years ago, President Clinton gloated about how the rest of the world should emulate our economy — with its low wages, high poverty rates, lack of worker protections, and scandalous disparity of wealth. I think that’s a sign of our insecurity; how we feel a need to lecture everyone else on the virtues of our way of doing things. A French president would never dream of holding forth like that, probably because the French feel that their identity involves more than just a set of ideas about how the economy should run. History and tradition figure in somewhere alongside the latest prices on the Paris stock exchange.

Scholars often note that the United States was the world’s first "modern" nation, a land peopled by immigrants breaking away from the old customs of Europe and ripping apart the ancient culture of the continent’s native inhabitants. And, as Charlene Spretnak points out in her fascinating book Resurgence of the Real (Addison-Wesley), the essence of modernity has always been about forsaking what’s real in favor of the abstract, the symbolic, the synthetic. We overlook the vital importance of the natural world, the human body, and a sense of place as we glorify the power of high technology, industrialized medicine, and the global economy. And this is not a condition confined to America. We may be the first modern nation, but the rest of the industrialized world followed quickly. France after all celebrates Bastille day, the anniversary of something that happened two hundred and nine years ago, not midsummer.

Midsummer and the Fourth of July and Bastille Day can all be wonderful occasions for enjoying the pleasures of summer (indeed a French restaurant in Minneapolis hosts a great Bastille Day bash with Paris musette music, a street dance, and mountains of baguettes with vats of delicious aioli). Yet the holiday we don’t recognize marks the arrival of the season itself while the ones we do stand merely as vague commemorations of nationalism. One is as real as the sunshine streaming in the window of my study, and the others just symbolic celebrations. In always choosing the abstract values of the modern age over the simple strengths of the real world — high-tech information systems over chats with our neighbors, global economic penetration over a healthy local community — we are missing a lot of what’s finest, most meaningful and most fun about life.

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