This Country Always Sucked, but Happy Fourth of July Anyways.

Hundreds of years ago this nation, the greatest fucking nation that ever walked the earth, the Tyrannosaurus Rex of sovereign countries, able to send all the other little saurian bitches scrambling into the Cretaceous brush, didn't exist - until it did. All at once the United States of America (USA) emerged from the celestial dust and began its cosmic expansion. All the unconsolidated matter - Ohio, indigenous people, slaves, coal mines, the NFL - had no choice but to be fed into the tornado that hoovered up everything in its path. But none of that great stuff could have happened without the foundling fathers who signed the oil industry and atomic warfare into being with the scratch of a pen.

Most of us have heard of a few of these autographing fathers - maybe Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Polling shows that 31 percent of US citizens can't name even one of these original guys. The national average is two and two thirds - most of us can name exactly that number of Declaration of Independence signees. You might ask how a poll responder contributes two thirds of a founding father - this pertains to the strangeness of statistics, and demands mathematical gifts that I have yet to attain. I trust the experts in this instance.

Most of us, if we ever spend even five seconds coming up for air from our online shopping and social media, might be wondering how many foundational fathers there were. Just a few minutes ago I had no idea myself - just as you have no idea until I tell you the answer. It might be twelve or seventeen or two hundred or seventy five, and in the bygone era of my youth I would have had to walk to the library and then waded through a three page essay on The Declaration of Independence to gain that knowledge. In all likelihood I would have said fuck it, I'm not walking two miles in the Fourth of July heat to look shit up in the World Book Encyclopedia.

What difference does it make if there were twenty eight or a hundred and eleven signees? And, if you are paying attention, you realize that public libraries close down on The Fourth of July - the only day that anyone might have an ounce of curiosity about the number of Declaration signees. The other three hundred and sixty four days of the year most Americans could give a rat's ass who signed and who did not.

But that was then, and this is now - we have invented Wikipedia and Chat GPT, so that anyone can blurt out: "Alexa, how many fathers signed The Declaration of Independence? and play Truckin' to Da Doo Dah Man, while you are at it."

And Wikipedia, Alexa and Chat would all concur that fifty six of these hoary ghosts pulled us with forceps from the birth-canal of nonbeing into the dark inevitability of world empire. You can even parse a list of said pen wielding founders of the republic and consider that, but for a few, most of the immortalized signatures will ring no bell - the founding fathers have been forgotten while you grill hotdogs and set off sparklers in their honor.

If you examine their occupations you will note not a single brick layer, dog walker, blacksmith, hair stylist, ballet dancer, coach driver, weaver, baker, fire fighter or plumber. The US revolution was no blue collar movement. You will notice fourteen plantation owners, a shit load of lawyers and a fair number of land speculators. This was an eighteenth century association of wannabe oligarchs who saw British Colonialism less as a philosophical impediment to some sort of abstraction about freedom, and more about freeing greedy speculators from the financial constraints imposed by The Crown.

The one founding father that even a dumbass can usually recall after a few moments of squinting is George Washington, who we have dubbed as the father of our great nation - even though he never signed the Declaration of Independence (he had a prior engagement). According to George Mason University economist, Robin Hanson, the icon of the dollar bill comes across as a man who would be blissfully at home in the future world of tax breaks for billionaires:

" “No theme appears more frequently in the writings of Washington,” writes one biographer, “than his love for the land—more precisely, his own land.” Another theme is decadence. George Washington was a profligate consumer. He desired the finest carriages, clothes, and furniture. Land rich and cash poor, he financed his luxurious lifestyle with enormous loans from British merchants.

This relentless quest for wealth dominated Washington’s pre-revolutionary years. After the Seven Years’ War, he amassed huge western claims. A few he bought legitimately. In some cases, he skirted laws, shadily buying under an assumed name or that of a relative. Other lands he acquired at the expense of his own militiamen—or so some of these angry veterans claimed. As a result of this scheming, Washington died the richest American president of all time. One ranking has him as the fifty-ninth richest man in US history."

It is wonderful to know that Donald Trump is not the first scoundrel to make the presidency into a tool of personal enrichment. I prefer to see my country as flowing along in typical fashion rather than as a noble experiment gone wrong.

If you lament that in modern times wars are opposed by the majority and shoved down the throats of the masses by those who reap profit from bloodshed, be joyful on this two hundred and fiftieth Independence Day that our first great war already manifest our most cherished ideal - the mandate for brave patriots to lay down their lives for the wealthy.

What about the complete unknowns who signed that famous parchment? There is a guy named Button Gwinnett, listed as being both a merchant and a plantation owner, but his claim to fame involved dying in a duel with another political luminary named Lachlan McIntosh. Button Gwinnett, apart from having the best name of any of our founding fathers, purchased an Island off the coast of Georgia and staffed his remote plantation with slaves, The duel with McIntosh, according to Wikipedia, had something to do with back and forth blame for a failed attack on a British encampment in East Florida. Apparently, the founding fathers divided their time between whipping slaves and ordering underlings to fight wars of territorial expansion. Button Gwinnett and Lachlan McIntosh settled their issues in the ritualistic framework of their times with pistols at 12 paces. They both aimed and shot at the same moment, and both hit their target. McIntosh took a lead pellet in the leg, and Gwinnett got one in the thigh. That seemingly ended the dispute, but Gwinnett never recovered. One imagines that sepsis followed, and with no anti-biotics, even a minor wound might be fatal. He died three days later, less than a year after signing the greatest country the world has ever seen into existence. Gwinnett's death from the medical primitivism of his times perhaps foreshadows the national health system taking shape under RFK Jr. in which a flesh wound from a low powered gun projectile might once again have no medical retort.

Carter Braxton is another Declaration signee that you probably never heard of. He only has a Wikipedia stub - an historical insult that Braxton almost certainly did not anticipate in 1776. He apparently married an heiress and used his dowry to purchase slaves. He did outdo all of his fellow founding fathers in one notable area, he took fathering seriously - eighteen children! That is three times more than Thomas Jefferson had with his wife, but Jefferson also fathered six more children with his slave, Sally Hemings. The Wikipedia stub does not mention how many of Braxton's children resulted from his sexual powers over slaves. That is the problem with history by Wikipedia - the larger story drifts just out of reach.

Wishing my readers a happy Fourth of July! - all things considered.