Independence Day-America Celebrates

Pick a Holiday. Any Holiday. Chances are good that your local retailers have a store wide theme to promote the celebration. Christmas brings Santa, elves and reindeer, Easter brings Peter Cottontail, and corporate America makes a fast buck. Marketing the Holidays is an age old tradition in a nation where age old traditions are actually relatively new. Driving sales and PR campaigns are the focus of a nearly year round advertising blitz by retailers, and some find it tasteless.

It's fairly likely that you have already encountered people who find fault with big box America for perpetuating a cycle of promotional bombardment, cluttering the hardware aisle with endless graphics and taglines, a call to action for products that are largely ornamental and impractical. You could argue that most of these specialty holiday and seasonal items are largely novelty based, baskets filled with plastic grass that affixes itself to the furniture in a matter of minutes, colored eggs that do little more than conceal a hard boiled center, hardly a delicacy. Consumerism of this nature, specifically the idea of "subverting" the holiday spirit for commercial purposes, strikes many as a gross commercialization of what should be a revered as a '"Holy" day.

This conception of America's retail giants as some type of callous capitalist henchmen is actually fairly common. Rarely do you hear anyone praising your local Wally World for their stunning Thanksgiving display. It would seem that hostility towards consumerism is the latest hip movement, the latest form of standing up to the man. More widespread in recent years, this negative outlook and its generally pessimistic connotations is most prominent around the Fourth of July, America's Independence Day. A day when most are filled with patriotic pride, children twirl and shake sparklers, and emergency rooms overflow with minor burn injuries.

A day when the symbols of an empire are most loudly praised can also be the day that irritates the anti-commercialism mindset the most. People who would ordinarily be mildly aggravated can often be completely intolerable on the anniversary of America's greatest triumph. Sour and irritable, celebration is the last concern for the angry idealist. It doesn't take much effort to imagine what effect celebrating the victory of a capitalist society has on the morally offended. Surely it flies in the face of all that they stand for, those things that they believe in and strive to uphold.

The patriotic reveler might never comprehend this view on capitalist culture, and would likely have poor luck lightening the mood of someone with this outlook. Questioning the tastefulness of the local convenience store's miniature flag and cigarette lighter might never have occurred to the average American. The obscene profit hauled in by corporate suits might be viewed as just deserts, richly deserved profits from a well run PR campaign. And the nonstop barrage of promotional materials might not receive a second glance from the crowd grabbing a case of beer and bag of ice on the way to the fireworks display.

And the fireworks are what brings these diverse mindsets together. Regardless of race, gender or political persuasion, every last woman, man and child will shell out hard earned cash for bottle rockets, roman candles, snakes, ladyfingers, jumping jacks and caterpillars, drive halfway across the state with a leaky styrofoam cooler, a leaky radiator and a leaky diaper and sit in the dirt in the hottest sun and miserable heat just to see the big fireworks display. The fireworks are usually set to music, and the staging area is almost always over a body of water, and the glow of the fireworks dance in the hazy reflection of the water's surface while the massive throng of humanity aligned on the opposing riverbanks oohs and ahhs at the display.

This is the true power of Independence Day, stirring even the most jaded soul, inspiring children to dance, bringing an entire city together on a humid, sweltering riverbank on the Fourth of July. Is it any wonder that we choose these fiery dancing images, burning brightly against the night sky as an allegory for the American Spirit? Everybody loves fireworks.