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Commemorating Independence Day, The Fourth of July 2024
America's 248th Birthday
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The celebration of the national holiday of the 4th of July has many features of Carnival. As stated on a typical Federal Holiday website: "Independence Day is commonly associated with barbecues, picnics, concerts, carnivals, parades, and fireworks." Therefore, this musical essay series for Independence Day logically follows the previous musical essay series "May Day Carnivalesque" in the sense of (a) continuing the theme of "carnivalesque" carnival of festivities, (b) popular culture's potential for social change, and (c) sharing the revolutionary theme of the "world turned upside down."
Actually, the previous two series of musical essays, "Beltane/May Day" (with its emphasis on how the premodern public festivals for May Day "misrule" increasingly, through rituals of "social inversion" of hierarchies, took on a political edge, leading to instances of popular insurrection) and "May Day Carnivalesque," served as appropriate lead-ins to this current "Independence Day" musical essay series, with its theme of "Total Revolution." Thus, the following important statement from the previous "May Day Carnivalesque" musical essays will find its way into this current musical essay series for Independence Day: "The popularity of the term carnivalesque and its approach to carnival owes much to the influence of Bakhtin, whose exuberant descriptions of the festive life of the Middle Ages--"carnivalesque"--have led scholars to explore how popular culture might work as a force for political change."
"In fireworks are released, all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. The inflammable desires, dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness, are ignited at night by the libertarian matches of sleep, and burst fourth in showers of shimmering incandescence. These imaginary displays provide a temporary relief." —Kenneth Anger
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The Bruce Springsteen song, “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," is not only appropriate here but also harks back to the GS' previous musical essay series, "May Day Carnivalesque," about carnival and carnivalesque. (There is a premodern notion about the significance of Carnival—that life is one long carnival. As the popular rock song goes: "Life is a carnival.")
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click on meme to access the "May Day Carnivalesque" webpage.
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The question behind the "Independence Day" Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack:
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WHAT IS AMERICA?
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America has been described as a "democratic experiment." Some astute observers of our nation have ventured to describe America as an "idea," a "conversation," and a "dream."
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("I would like to discuss some of the problems that we confront in the world today, and some of the problems that we confront in our own nation by using as a subject The American Dream. I choose this subject because America is essentially a dream. It is a dream of a land where men of all races, of all nationalities, and of all creeds, can live together as brothers. The substance of the dream is expressed in these sublime words, “We hold these truths to be self- evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." ~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "'The American Dream' July 4th Speech," Lincoln University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 4, 1965.)
However, the GS likes to conceive of America as a "tune." To read some visionary quotations about what America really is, click on link below.
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Thematic Images of the Imagination of America,
from 16th to the 19th Centuries
"America" (The Four Continents series, Zucchi 1777)
Four Parts of the World series - America (Giordano, 17th c.)
"Africa and America" (The Four Continents series, Hinton 1808)
The Personification of the American Continent (Giovanni Tiepolo, ca. 1752)
Miss America - Four Continents (Monkman, 2012)
Thematic Images of America as American and African Amerindians
Thematic Images of America as "Indian Princess" & the "Goddess Columbia"
Goddess Columbia with Phrygian Liberty Cap and flag
Goddess Columbia with Phrygian Liberty Cap and flag