Of Fireworks and American Dreams

On the morning of July 4th, I heard Billy Joel's "Allentown" over the radio.

Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down

Specifically, the song is about a town's prosperity built on an era of American industry no longer with us. Broadly speaking, it's really about the myth and reality of the American dream. The song is catchy, nostalgic, angry, and, despite dating from 1982, surprisingly resonant for Independence Day 2013.

Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line.

 A two and a half hour drive away, the mid-Hudson area has long since faced the same de-industrialization as Allentown. A land once home to powerful industry and strong unions, it is no news that we now live in a land that is a shadow of its former self. Joel said he had considered using Long Island's Levittstown as the song's subject, but surely it could also have been Detroit or nearly anywhere in upstate New York. Anywhere that industrialists have fled in an attempt to exploit weak labor laws half a world away.

Well we're waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found

At my Fourth of July party, actually held on 5th, the state of our nation came up in various ways. People in their middle age reminisced about high school in the 1980's, I talked globalization and the decline of American labor with a man (coincidently from Bethlehem, PA) in his 60's. One woman quipped about how Hyde Park, the home of FDR, was sure to close down an elementary school built as program of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930's.

For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved.

My music choice was a topic of particular criticism. Psy, of "Gangam Style" fame was attacked for the rather dubious claim that he "hates Americans." For many, the residue of American pride in the face of declining cause for celebration is a stubborn nationalism.

So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all

Of the attendees at our party were in the middle or at the end of working careers, though none were in the mines or mills. There was a substitute middle school teacher. A security guard. A retired psychiatric hospital nurse. An ex-Boars Head meat counter worker. A retired crime reporter. A part-time professor.

No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke,
Chromium steel. 

The night before, we grabbed chocolate malts and Orange Juliuses from Dairy Queen and watched fireworks by the Mid-Hudson Bridge. People of all ethnicities and ages gathered for their yearly patriotic ritual. Even from the distance that we were at, they impressed.

Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got.

As we returned to drop off my grandmother, who at 77 had joined us at the fireworks in her lawn chair, a re-run of the Macy's Firework Spectacular was playing on television. Before Brad Paisley stepped up the the microphone, we were greeted with various people around the country speaking on the subject of the American spirit. Each, from a nurse in Moore, Oklahoma to a firefighter outside Boston, echoed a theme of community and mutual aid: "When someone falls down, another is there to help them up."

Something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face