Independence Day, 2025

Patriotic words and music from my battered and shattered American heart

Patriotic decorations outside the library where I sometimes work in Philadelphia, just a few blocks away from Independence Hall.

Today’s the Fourth of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
What a waste of gunpowder and sky

Those lovely, downcast lines come from one of the many great songs on Aimee Mann’s fabulous solo debut, Whatever, from 1993. (I wrote about my enduring love for Mann’s music here.) The song is about a relationship, but I’ve quoted from it as a way of conveying my conflicted feelings about celebrating Independence Day six months into the second Trump administration.

My love for my country has always been a complicated love—like the love for a parent who sometimes acts stupidly or irresponsibly. The love is always there, because the parent is one’s parent, and love for one’s own isn’t conditional on the object of affection being worthy of love. But the love can be mixed with disappointment and even anger when the parent’s behavior falls short of standards one strongly believes should apply to all decent people.

The rise of Trump—not merely his fluke 2016 win, but far more so his re-election by a wider margin in 2024—has created a much bigger problem. And to make matters even more fraught, this past week has been overflowing with stories seemingly meant to drive home the point that the United States is evolving in an ominous direction that I personally find pretty repulsive. Let’s just say it doesn’t put me in the mood to salute the flag or pay homage to the country and its 18th-century origins.

Bad Moon Rising

Here are just a few of those news stories:

• The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, which I wrote about a few days ago, appeared to grant a wayward and even lawless executive greater short-term freedom of action in return for a vow from the Solicitor General that the president would abide by the high court’s “judgments and opinion” when it rules against the administration at some indeterminate point in the future. (Will Donald Trump feel bound by what that Solicitor General said in oral arguments before the court? Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the other members of the majority in Trump v. CASA seem to assume so. If only I were capable of such faith!)

• The president and other Republicans are insinuating that Zohran Mamdani, the naturalized American citizen who won the Democratic primary in the race for mayor of New York City, should be arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported from the country. And as Jonathan Last explained in a powerful post for The Bulwark that has haunted me over the past few days, there are laws on the books dating from the McCarthy era that just might make such an appalling series of events possible. (This week John Ganz also wrote a powerful post, to which Last links, that really brings home the insidiousness of the push to strip political enemies of their citizenship, effectively turning them into stateless people beyond the protection of any country’s laws.)

• Paramount/CBS News reached a $16 million settlement with Donald Trump over his thoroughly frivolous lawsuit because the former feared the latter would use his power as president to scuttle a corporate merger. The implications of these events—the lawsuit and then the capitulation to it in order to avoid presidential retribution—are grave.

• Meanwhile, my employer, the University of Pennsylvania, reached its own agreement with the Trump administration over having allowed a transgender woman—Lia Thomas, now graduated—to compete on the women’s swim team at a time when Title IX rules suggested this was the proper course of action. I have no objection to the university conforming to the Trump administration’s revised guidelines going forward, but forcing Penn to apologize for its past actions and applying current rules retroactively by stripping Thomas of titles she earned under the old rule, is appalling, gratuitously cruel behavior. (In other words, standard behavior for the second Trump administration.)

• Then, last but not at all least, there’s the fiscally disastrous (and absurdly named) “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which throughout the week slowly worked its way through the constipated bowels of Congress like a toxic turd destined to be left in the center of the sidewalk of American democracy. People talk a lot about the Democratic Party being a coalition of interest groups clamoring for goodies, and so it is. But how to describe the GOP, which combines an enduring faction of legislators tirelessly devoted to cutting taxes for rich people with another faction primarily motivated by hatred of providing access to health care for the poor and then attempts to conceal the greed and cruelty under a cloak of talk about the need to address the country’s unsustainable debt—when the end result will actually make the country’s fiscal situation vastly worse than it already is?

(That was a rhetorical question—though by all means offer suggestions in the comments.)

Politics and Precarity

In any event, those are the stories that have competed for my attention over the past week as I’ve been trying to make some headway on my book about Leo Strauss and the American right in the run-up to the Independence Day holiday weekend.

These various threads came together as I read Strauss’ letters with scholar Gerhard Krüger during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Strauss had never completed his “Habilitation”—the second dissertation that German universities require before aspiring professors can land a long-term academic position and take on regular teaching duties. So his situation as an itinerate Jewish scholar was pretty tenuous through the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

His main perch was at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, a rabbinical seminary, in Berlin. But in a letter dated October 3, 1931, Strauss wrote to Krüger in an anxious tone: “I am in great difficulty: my institution is under threat of dissolving. I have to be prepared to have nothing as of January 1.” And indeed, at the start of 1932, with fundraising for a Jewish institute in an increasingly anti-Semitic Germany becoming impossible, most of the staff, including Strauss, was let go. (The institute limped on until 1942, when it was finally closed down by the Nazi government.) With the help of a small circle of friends and supporters, Strauss managed to apply for and receive a grant from the Rockefeller Institute that enabled him to continue his various scholarly projects, first in Paris, and then at the University of Cambridge in England before he finally settled for the rest of his life in the United States.

Reading about Strauss’ precarity in these years through the lens of his letters has really helped me to understand what it feels like, from the inside, to be truly imperiled by politics—during the rise of European fascism a hundred years ago, and at the present moment, during whatever one wants to call our time of ascendent authoritarianism.

American Tune

So celebrating the Fourth of July this year will feel different, and be more troubled, than usual.

That’s why I’m going to leave you with a special performance of what has long been my favorite, deeply ambivalent song about our country. The song is “American Tune” by Paul Simon—though describing it that way is a little deceptive. The lovely vocal melody and accompanying harmony is cribbed from J.S. Bach’s setting of the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” from the St. Matthew Passion, which is itself a resetting of an earlier piece of music by Hans Leo Hassler titled “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret.”

So Simon can’t take primary credit for the music, though the song’s lovely bridge is his alone. But he wrote the lyrics himself, and what lyrics they are. Written in the early 1970s, they perfectly capture the listless spiritual confusion of that moment, with the Vietnam War limping to an ignominious end, the counterculture exhausted and its extravagant hopes coming to naught, and the storm clouds of Watergate just beginning to gather. The song has so many wonderful, moving lines that I won’t even bother to highlight any of them and simply urge you, instead, to listen to, read, and ponder them as a whole on your own. (You’ll find the lyrics reproduced under the link below.)

Simon’s original version is delicate and beautiful. But the one I’m sharing with you today—by a postmodern cabaret singer named Cecile McLorin Salvant—is sublime, the song’s baroque chord progression crossed with quiet jazz piano improvisation that give the impression of listening to something old and well-ordered that’s been smashed and is breaking down. Come to think of it, that works remarkably well with the lyrical emphasis on being “battered” and “shattered” by events. It’s a truly great song—and this is a truly great rendition of it that speaks directly to my battered and shattered American heart. I hope it does something similar for you.

I wish you all a contented and restful Independence Day, however you choose to celebrate or mourn. I’ll see you next week, on the other side.

@cecilemclorinsalvantAmerican tune #americantune #paulsimon @sullivanfortner

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American Tune
By Paul Simon

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken
And certainly misused

Oh, but I’m alright, I’m alright
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees

But it’s alright, it’s alright
For we’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly

And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea

And I dreamed I was flying
We didn’t come here on the Mayflower
We were dragged on a ship under a blood-red moon
[[Orig.: We come on the ship they call The Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon]]
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune

Oh, but it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all, I’m trying to get some rest

American Tune lyrics © Sony/atv Songs Llc