Of hokey films and wasteful fireworks

It's July Fourth, and if your TV is on, you've seen Ultimate Evildoers suddenly obliterate several major American landmarks, including the Empire State Building and the White House, all but vaporizing New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. Relax, it's just a movie! This is what passes for patriotic holiday entertainment: a rebroadcast of that hokey flick, "Independence Day" – director Roland Emmerich's cheesily nightmarish 1996 "science fiction" scenario of Planet Earth facing a hostile alien takeover.

They're heeeeere!

Flash forward to "real-life" 2004: Aliens of the shape-shifting, illegal, Bushian brand infest the White House, the Pentagon, the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, the state of Florida, the Fox Network, the FCC, the so-called "Red (haw-haw) States" – in fact, far too much of America.

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Evidence?

Well, consider the Tee-Hee Factor alone:

Dick "Potty Mouth" Cheney's unrepentant public profanity goes unpunished while outspoken administration critics' broadcast FCC fines rack up millions. Should you wish to purchase an all-occasion, portable Dick "Effing" Cheney of your own, by the way, you don't need to become a stockholder in Halliburton. Instead, you can get a "Swearing Punch Bag," that shouts unpleasant phrases when whacked – a visionary invention lauded by the Daily Star as "So childish, so tacky, and very desirable!"

And how could we forget U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent costumed rendition of the Village People's disco anthem "YMCA," which, I predict, will eclipse Attorney General John Ashcroft's painfully awful crooning of that unintentionally lugubrious ditty he penned, "Let the Eagle Fly."

No, he wasn't referring to taking the American Eagle off the Endangered Species list, either.

Yet this Independence Day, Philadelphia, America's Cradle of Liberty, had an unlikely, and heartrending, 72-hour invasion in the name of peace: a Quaker-inspired traveling anti-war memorial – "Eyes Wide Open: An Exhibition of the Human Costs of the Iraq War" – featuring nearly 1,000 pairs of combat boots tagged with names of the United States soldiers who died in Iraq, juxtaposed with a 24-foot wall listing the names and incidents documenting the deaths of more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians.

What a fabulous gesture of freedom, interdependence and empathy!

Criss-crossing the country, this poignant exhibit – commemorating these military and civilian victims and cataloguing the incalculable social, political and economic costs of this needless conflict – was displayed at Philadelphia's Independence Mall and Visitor Center ... on federal ground, gang!!

Yay! But whose head will roll for that?

Elsewhere, fireworks aficionados and gas-station jingoists celebrated their putative "patriotism" with obnoxious "Exploding Terrorists Heads Four-Packs" – advertised as "a chance to blow up" Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Moammar Gadhafi.

Terror-ific!

If turnabout's fair play, I shudder to imagine what fantasy fireworks folks watch in other parts of the world. Burning Bushes, anyone? David "Scanners" Cronenberg would have a field day!

Personally, I never "got" the fireworks thing – such conspicuous non-consumption. A Freudian could say those voyeurs must be sexually blocked, therefore symbolically receiving a pseudo-orgasmic "kick" via pyrotechnics from afar.

Besides, they're literally seeing money go up in smoke. Manhattan spiritual counselor "Sforza Destino" calls it "The Coliseum Syndrome." Macy's department store, he points out, still financially shaky after emerging from bankruptcy, shamelessly squandered $10 million it doesn't really have on this year's Big Apple fireworks. While soup kitchens – like the one where he volunteers to feed the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the underemployed, the battered – are funded by charitable contributions miniscule by comparison.

"People sitting watching these wasteful fireworks – it's atrocious! This is just the Coliseum revisited. Spending that kind of money on fireworks to make people 'happy' is a fake, artificial joy," he reminds us. "There's a much greater joy in helping the less fortunate."

Before the final battle in the film "Independence Day," this almost-Shakespearean soliloquy from the script gives them – and now us – hope. America – and this very planet – MUST survive the Bush administration's toxic policies that prize corporations over people:

Perhaps it's fate that today, July
the Fourth, we will once again
fight for our freedom. Not from
tyranny, persecution or
oppression. But from
annihilation. We're fighting for
our right to live, to exist. From
this day on, the fourth day of
July will no longer be remembered
as an American holiday but as the
day that all of mankind declared
we will not go quietly into the
night. We will not vanish without
a fight. We will live on. We
will survive.