Happy Independence Day

A postscript to my thoughts about H.L. Mencken yesterday, in which he accurately described contemporary politics: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is still an ideal 108 years after he wrote that. The republic may be hanging on by a thread, but it’s still here.

I am not entirely enamored with the state of the republic, but the loyal opposition has spent the last 10 years presenting naysaying or a Soviet-style state (like the one we lived from 2021 to 2024) rather than legitimate alternatives, and so here we are.

But this is July 4, and so I come to celebrate. The Declaration Of Independence is a sacred document, containing as profound a statement as humans have ever declared — “that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain, unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that is to say obvious and undisputed, and yet from the beginning every word has been disputed, every phrase has been challenged.

Who is this Creator? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord of hosts, the King of glory.

That Creator has endowed us with “certain” rights, that is to say “clearly defined”; “unalienable,” that is to say, to take a phrase from another sacred document, “shall not be abridged.”

Gosh, is it really 25 years ago that I sent reporters onto the streets of Green Bay to reproduce an experiment — show people the Bill of Rights, describe it as a petition, and see if people were willing to sign it? “I don’t know if I could support this,” one law officer said in response to some of the limits on law officers. Others expressed skepticism about limits on free speech, the ownership of arms, the right to an attorney, and just about every other tenet.

I think all pretenders to the throne or other public office ought to be pressed regarding how serious they are about defending the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Judging from their performance, I dare say nearly all of them would fail.

The words are a little more complicated than “live and let live,” but that’s the essence. Don’t tread on your neighbors, lest there be consequences. And that phrase “all men” is meant literally: “All” means all, and of course the word “men” also includes all women in this context.

It is literally a revolutionary concept, and it has been constantly challenged for a quarter of a millennium, battered but never beaten. May the beacon shine ever brightly against the darkness.

A riot of peasants

A friend posted a Fox News report about an earthquake off the Russian coast that sparked tsunami warnings in Japan, Alaska, and the entire west coast of the U.S. of A. (and, I presume, Canada). I applied search engines and found no news coverage; a further inspection found that the Fox report was dated July 29, 2025. Once again, the words of the philosopher poet Tom Petty ring true: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

Afterward she asked, perhaps rhetorically, why these sort of things appear in her Facebook news feed, and I replied with H.L. Mencken’s famous quote about practical politics and hobgoblins, adding, “Social media algorithms seem to have been designed with practical politics in mind.”

I wanted to quote Mencken accurately, and so I turned to In Defense of Women, the 1918 book where that wonderfully succinct sentence appeared, and I discovered that the context remains also tremendously relevant:

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers.”

I’m not sure if I would ever describe war as “waged by the will of superior men” or “the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race,” but I probably forget that Mencken was possessed of a supreme wit and sense of irony.

The point is that Mencken, 108 years ago, described war and politics as accurately as one of our contemporaries might. Of what are our practical “republican” or “democratic” politicians capable beyond “throwing the mob into a panic”? Who are they other than “mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers”? And how could you better describe our political conversation than “an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”?

When I peruse what passes for the news of the world today, I need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, no matter how insane it all appears, God is in control, and “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Second, Henry Louis Mencken was one of the canniest observers of the human condition ever to have lived.

Love and peace as a public stand

I’m on the back deck again, the temperature around 60 and the sun in my face. I’ve gotten a little housework done, and the yard work is taunting me as if to say, “You do know the weather is perfect for working outside, should you ever decide to get off your duff?”

Beyond this idyllic scene, gasoline is up to $4.50 a gallon, about $2 more than before the U.S. government started to bomb Iran. I liked it better when the president was bragging about how many wars he had ended. It seems to be inevitable that the weapons industry will eventually get a bug in a president’s ear and convince him to start blowing things up. Once the explosives are deployed, of course, new explosives need to be ordered to replace them; after all, the war racket must be maintained.

I have tried to keep politics out of my blog, but “Love God and love your neighbor” has become a radical political statement these days. I still believe we are born with certain rights — rights that are certain — beginning with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My personal pursuit of happiness led me to love God and love my neighbors, and judging from the anger, hatred, violence and viciousness rampant in our public discourse these days, I have to believe I have been more successful than a lot of people in securing a modicum of happiness.

Chaos agents across the land are trying to drive wedges between neighbors, and they have had more success than I care to admit. I’ve said before that my top expectations from politicos are promoting freedom and peace, and that no one in the ruling class cares about such things — they are too busy stirring up hatred and fomenting civil unrest. But we need not heed the chaos agents, not when such a better path is open before us.

It’s spring planting season, and we need plowshares more than we need swords if we’re to eat next winter. I refuse to hate my neighbors, a group of people that includes even you who insist I should be seething with hate.

At least that’s how I see life on a sunny day on the back porch in early May. The cardinals, goldfinches and blackbirds are chirping agreement.