With Independence Day upon us, Americans are coming together once again in celebration of all our many freedoms, among them the freedom to drink outside during daylight hours. Some of us will fish Bud tallboys out of an Igloo on the National Mall; others will knock back rosé on picnic blankets and applejack at backyard barbecues; still others will sip on a pint bottle of Cutty Sark on the same park bench as always. We are a diverse nation.
Meanwhile, the professional fireworks display is an exercise in pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris. The pyrotechnician—and, more importantly, his patron—intends to ornament the night sky beyond the powers of God himself. He means to inspire awe for little purpose other than to demonstrate his power. The first great fireworks nuts in the Western world were Peter the Great (who put on a five-hour show to celebrate the birth of his first son) and Louis XIV (who, with a specially equipped sundial, used them to tell time at Versailles). Fireworks are imperialist and, as we used to say in school, hegemonic. That they are popularly believed to be populist entertainment does not say much for the populace.
Of course, I would be no better than those yahoos were I not to add some nuance to this argument. Pyrotechnicians deserve credit for doing moderately interesting things with light. Light can be pretty, and fire can be cool. Perhaps human culture really began on that Paleolithic night when man first decided that, instead of going out to dinner with his friends, he'd stay in and sit around the fire just for the hell of it, for purely recreational purposes. Who doesn't enjoy the glow of a Yule Log? The rowdy roar of a good bonfire? The lambent flicker of an incriminating document? One New Year's Eve in Amsterdam, I watched a steady orange flame consume an upright piano in the middle of the narrow road. My extreme pleasure was tainted only by the regret that it was not a concert grand.
Do you remember Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, their union symbolized by a great crash of fireworks outside their balcony overlooking the harbor of Monte Carlo? The only thing wrong with that scenario, it has always seemed to me, is that any normal couple would be out on the balcony enjoying the fireworks, and not inside tumbling around on a bed.
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