After losing power for the entire weekend, we joked that we were doing it as the Founders did – no lights, no running water, no air conditioning – but who are we kidding?
The Friday before the Fourth of July my lovely wife and I did something we almost never do: Went out for dinner by ourselves without being on vacation, joining a group of friends, or before some kind of event like a concert. This was unusual in general because we prefer to cook at home if something special isn’t going on, and specifically because it was the day before the Fourth of July itself, Independence Day, my favorite holiday, above even Christmas. Normally, I am at my parent’s house by the early afternoon to prepare for an annual party honoring the occurrence since 1996, when my friends and I pitched tents in the backyard before we were even old enough to drink legally. This year was a little different for more reasons than one. First, it was ridiculously hot with temperatures Thursday, Friday, and Saturday regularly hitting 100 degrees in New Jersey and across the entire region. Second, we were expecting a little lower turn out than usual because some relatives couldn’t join us. Third, we were serving ribs as the main course, which only take around six hours to cook and don’t require me to fire up the smoker at the crack of dawn. The combination of the three made the rare date night possible, and as luck would have it, it turned out that our restaurant of choice – a wonderfully quaint and charming BYOB Italian place right up the block in rural NJ – was going to be closed for a few days afterwards. As a result, they were giving away the bread and pastries, so we left with full bellies, a couple of bags, and a tray worth of goodies, all the better for the party the next day.
We arrived home a few minutes later thinking the future was bright, planning to watch a movie before getting a good night’s sleep to be properly rested for the festivities, until my wife pushed the button to open the garage door and nothing happened. Though the sun had set by then, it was still bright enough at this time of year, not long after the Summer Solstice, to miss that none of the lights were on. She pushed the button again as humans tend to do when something doesn’t work at first, thinking, hoping, perhaps even praying that she missed it the first time or there was some other issue which would soon resolve itself. With me looking on from the passenger seat, concern growing on my face, the smile running away from lips, she went so far as to make a third and even fourth attempt before it finally sunk in that somehow a storm had swept through while we were at dinner and then the smile was completely gone. At the time, we noticed only a slight flickering of the lights from inside the restaurant, but apparently a short, powerful storm with high winds had blown through and the power was out. Though we have a key should this unlikely eventuality arrive – us, stuck outside the house, unable to open one of the garage doors – for some reason, my wife seemed to remember that an internal lock was latched into place and we feared we might not be able to get in the house at all, prompting concern and disappointment to veer briefly into something close to panic. Fortunately or unfortunately, we’d been in and out so many times before we left, the back door was open and we were able to secure entry without my wife having to try slipping through the doggie door, which we still think she might have been able to do.
Under normal circumstances, losing power sucks, but these weren’t normal circumstances, far from it. Beyond being the eve of my favorite holiday, the storm did little to decrease the temperature and the house itself was stifling at first, requiring several hours to cool down to something reasonable after opening all of the windows. Because it was the eve of my favorite holiday and the storm itself came up unexpectedly, it was both unlikely the power company was going to have crews on stand by to fix it anytime soon and very likely that there would be a lot of fireworks in advance of Independence Day itself, which I love almost as much as the holiday itself, but which drive our three-legged grey hound, Rosie to ever sadder and more pathetic fits the longer the festivities go on. At the slightest sound of thunder, a gunshot from the TV, a bomb bursting in air whether for real or for fun, or anything of the short, she pants, she whines, she barks, she seeks shelter between the toilet and the wall in the bathroom or way, way back in the closet where you can’t even see her, or just paces around the house as though the world were truly coming down around her and she was seeking the best possible place to survive while remaining completely unable to find it. Under the best of circumstances, it’s a nerve wracking experience for both her, her loving owners, and her younger brother, Carlitos, the Mexican-Chinese whippet, who certainly doesn’t like loud noises, but doesn’t completely freak out either. Dealing with it in a dark, hot, house, knowing we were supposed to leave first thing the next morning wasn’t going to be easy, especially when neither of us thought the power would be restored by then.
The next day, the Fourth of July itself dawned hot and bright as expected and with no electricity, also as expected, but necessarily far less pleasantly than the weather. Further, because we have well water, when the power goes out, so do the faucets, the toilets – and the shower. While Rosie and Carlitos appeared to have recovered from the fireworks, or at least there were no obvious signs of PTSD at that point, despite the popular memes about doggies and the Fourth of July, their presence only served to complicate matters further. Despite checking the power company website first thing and several times after, there were no updates and we still had no idea when the power was coming back. The day itself was supposed to top a hundred degrees, and my stepdaughter was supposed to stay with them while we headed down to my parents. My stepdaughter is on the autism spectrum. Though she is very high functioning and capable of what many people she describes as neurotypical are not, she has certain quirks. Under normal circumstances, she enjoys nothing more than having the house to herself with her beloved dogs (she and the whippet are a dynamic duo, spending most of their time together and taking hour long walks almost every day). Given the chance to be alone, she was planning on filming cooking videos for her new YouTube channel, but one of the things she fears more than anything else is being without electricity and losing power on her cell phone. Could we leave them alone under these conditions when there was still no word on when the power was coming back? Left with few options and much to be decided, I did the only thing I could at the time: Grabbed a bar of soap and proceeded to take a shower in the pool, hoping to at least clear my head a little. After, we settled on my wife and I heading down for the party with the provision that my wife would come back if there was some kind of emergency, but fortunately, one of our neighbors still had power and loves dogs as well, agreeing to board the trio overnight.
Of the party itself, I will only say this: Anyone who spent the holiday in the scorching mid Atlantic region who attended a BBQ, should give due honor to their grill warrior. Most of the time, I love working the barbecue and the smoker, two things I have enjoyed and I’d like to believe have gotten quite good at since high school to the point where I’ll frequently man someone else’s grill just to do so, but this Independence Day, America’s 250th birthday, wasn’t most of the time. Instead, it was hotter than the very hell they were claiming all week. The sun, after a few minutes of exposure, might as well have been the space laser from the almost forgotten 1980’s classic starring Val Kilmer, Real Genius, capable of burning you to the proverbial crisp and the shade wasn’t much better. Rarely, am I pleased when turn out is low for one of these events, but having had 31 of them since 1996, one gets used to the ebbs and flows of people, and in this case, “only” having to do five racks of ribs on the smoker plus chicken kabobs, mini quesadillas, hot dogs, and corn on the Blackstone griddle was nothing short of a relief. The smoker, in particular, is located in a part of the yard that get direct sunlight most of the day, as though the great, flaming, burning orb in the sky was a spotlight. Merely wrapping the five racks midway through cooking – to seal in the juices and prevent the smoke flavor from becoming overwhelming if you are unfamiliar with the trick– almost required a break after the second rack. About three hours into it, I almost deliriously wondered why we weren’t going through nearly as much charcoal as usual, only to reason that the ambient temperature of a black, oven shaped box in the midday heat was probably 125 degrees and I was only cooking at 250. They probably would’ve cooked on their own without a flame if I left them in there long enough. Though the Blackstone was under an awning, a griddle kicks off a lot of heat from it’s flat, metal top, and so it went, prompting my brothers and my sister to reminiscence about a Fourth of July party long ago – likely the fourth or the sixth one – that might have been as hot before we had a pool, and one of her college friends danced under the sprinkler in a low-cut sundress…
Of course, we weren’t the only ones affected by the heat. This wasn’t merely a birthday party for me, a friend, or someone in the family. This was the birthday party for the entire United States and as the 250th of its kind, supposed to be one of, if not the best. As we arrived at our parent’s house and the day was getting underway, the heat was impacting the entire region. The opening of the Great American State Fair was postponed after several people had passed out from heat exhaustion a day earlier, prompting everyone who had decided to base their celebration in the nation’s capitol to come up with alternate plans. To make matters more interesting, because interesting seemed to be the theme of the entire weekend, the heat was finally expected to break late that Saturday afternoon thanks to an epic series of thunderstorms that were supposed to blow through and do so rather fiercely, prompting many to wonder whether the fireworks would be cancelled in DC and elsewhere, even whether President Donald Trump would deliver his much anticipated speech. Throughout the day there were rumors and grumblings of delays or cancellations, with much of the media viewing such an outcome as a potential embarrassment for a President they largely loathe, as if he could control the weather in the first place. Throughout, President Trump was typically Trump, telling Fox News’ Brett Baier, if they stormed the beaches on D-Day amid challenges with the forecast, the least he could do was deliver a speech and he would do so no matter what.
Politically speaking, the heat wasn’t all figurative. Like everything else these days, America’s 250th birthday has revealed a schism between the left and the right with the President right in the center. Beyond being desperate for the festivities he planned and promoted to fail somehow, a rhetorical duel emerged over the meaning of America’s independence 250 years later in the first place. Generally speaking, conservative individuals such as myself preferred to highlight America’s greatness, those things we did that no one else could and how we changed the world for the better on route to becoming the most powerful, prosperous country in the history of the known universe. The President himself took the lead with this approach at a preliminary speech to open the new center devoted to President Teddy Roosevelt near Mount Rushmore. As he put it, “Americans honor excellence; we admire boldness; we respect ambition. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters and, in every human endeavor, Americans see an unfinished competition. What is strong can be made stronger. What is fast can be made faster. What is great can be made greater than ever before. And that’s what’s happening with America. Show us a mountain, and we’ll just climb it. Show us an ocean, and we’ll just cross it. Show us a problem, and we will just solve it. Show us a task the world calls impossible, and Americans will get it done.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has recently emerged as a power player in Democrat politics and something of a foil to the President, took the opposite approach during a speech at Gracie Mansion. In his view, America might be perfectable at some point, presumably under the leadership of Democratic Socialists or something similar, but that point was far, far away. Rather than focusing on our greatness, he described the plight of immigrants, then and now. “When those passengers lifted their heads to glimpse what lies just beyond the waves, what did they see? They saw land, lush and teeming with life. They saw men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage. They saw tenements rife with squalor. They saw industry rumbling with activity, steam and smoke rising, a city on the move. They saw a towering monument to freedom, her torch glowing world-wide welcome. They saw New York City. They saw America…Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see the nativism they would face — the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand. ” The problem was, “The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.” Fortunately, however, all is not lost because “The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”
While everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion, this strikes me as a bizarre way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. It’s a fundamental fact of life, the curse of our mortal existence, that nothing is ever or will be perfect. While we may choose to dwell on our faults, the 250th birthday of one’s own country – one Mayor Mamdami chose as an immigrant himself – probably isn’t the best occasion to do so. Perhaps an enterprising reporter should ask him precisely what country has gotten immigration right in the first place, which one does not have a wealthy leadership class, and which one has not the slightest tinge of nativism. Personally, I would love to know the answer, because it is a long-standing irony of Democratic Socialists that their model countries are either almost uniformly of the same race, creed, and religion, or they uniformly mount a pogrom to wipe out the undesirables. In any event, as someone said, it’s like celebrating a 10th, 20th, or 50th wedding anniversary and choosing to do a toast to how long it takes your wif to get ready sometimes or the few occasions when she accidentally scraped up the car. There are times when constructive criticism is warranted and times when it isn’t. While it might be easy to blame this one on President Trump himself and clearly the amount of vitriol was easily doubled, quadrupled, or perhaps quintipled with his occupancy of the Oval Office, the trend of using the Fourth of July to denigrate America is sadly nothing new. It was simply worse this time, which strikes me as doubly strange considering it’s a midterm election year and much of the fall campaign will likely be centered around the country’s perceived faults. Couldn’t we all just set aside a single day to enjoy the fireworks and flyovers despite the literal and figurative heat?
Speaking of which, the heat finally did break into storms over the nation’s capitol and elsewhere, prompting them to close the fair once again, only to have patriotic, perhaps intoxicated and in no mood to miss anything else attendees refuse to leave despite risking arrest before the fireworks. While we didn’t have fireworks of our own this year, the neighborhood itself was ablaze before the sun had even set – when the temperature was still close to 95 degrees, before the storms rolled in. As luck would have it, the block behind my parents’ was ground zero in the area, and so my brothers and I ended a sweltering day of celebration – I’d finally cooled down from working the grill at that point – by watching them go off less than a hundred yards away from the patio. We still didn’t have power at home – indeed, when we returned home the next day, we learned we will not likely have it until Wednesday and I’m writing this using a mobile hotspot – but that was something to be thankful for. Neither the heat, nor who occupies the Oval Office, no electricity itself would stop us from celebrating, as it should be, and as it happened, finding ourselves without power on Sunday only prompted us to continue the celebrations for another day. At points, we joked that we were doing it as the Founders did – no lights, no running water, no air conditioning, for freak’s sake our salt shakers and pepper grinders have batteries these days – but who are we kidding? We had hot spots on our phone, a portable speaker, a portable phone charger, and a swimming pool that will need a lot of work once the power was restored, but had not yet gone south. We also had a rainbow. The evening before the Fourth, as we wondered what what we do and we had nothing else to do do, I lit a fire in the backyard, and there it was, a gorgeous rainbow, rising right above the house, heralding good things to come, even if they weren’t this particular weekend.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 