Breakfast radio can be lonely. It’s dark when you unlock the studio, print out the weather and start talking to an audience, who is, mostly, still in bed.
No doubt many of you accidentally or deliberately celebrated the overthrow of British imperialism by a militia of American farmers 220 years ago. The gold-coast chapter of the Australian American Association hosted a barbecue on Friday: The Drink nightclub in Surfers went red white and blue on Friday night.
Reassured to know that someone’s listening, I was chastened to realise that I’d hurt someone’s feelings.
The first caller was American. “July the 4th is our birthday,†he said. “How would you feel if someone started shouting insults at you on your birthday.â€
“Fair point,†I said, “I’ll pass your comments along to other listeners.â€
The impact of the American revolution, though, has not been all good.
Tossing heavily taxed British tea overboard in the Boston harbour, for example, has given the septic tanks an ongoing distaste for the humble cuppa. As a result it is impossible to get a decent brew anywhere north of Atlanta and south of Ontario.
Nevertheless, the principles of freedom and human rights enshrined by the founding fathers in the constitution of that fledgling republic still capture the imagination of freedom fighters everywhere. Ho Chi Minh, for one, used the declaration of Independence as the basis of his first speech to a newly independent Vietnam in September 1945.
Unfortunately, those principles and the republic itself have been deliberately undermined from within. The America First movement grew from the Spanish wars with Mexico and the annexation of the Philippines in 1899 until the second world war. They largely lost the argument under Harry Truman who tested the atom bomb on innocent civilians deliberately duped into the streets to collect data on the effects of nuclear weapons. The Bretton Woods conference, The Monroe Doctrine, Kennedy’s adventurism, the shame of Chile, el Salvador and Panama naturally followed.
Patriotic Americans, like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky, have written widely on the dangers of the security state that emerged to protect this imperial court. They also lament the security laws that protect the American people from the true nature of the American project.
It has taken a cynical war in Iraq to expose once and for all that, while spouting the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, the American imperial government will blithely spent three trillion dollars, kill hundreds of thousands of people and destroy their education, health services and government, just to get their hands on the world’s last untapped oil reserves.
As I said when I passed on my listener’s comments on Friday, “I do not want to offend those of you who celebrate the principles that founded the American republic 200 years ago, but those principles have been compromised and undermined by an empire that has thrown its shadow across the world for my entire lifetime.â€
The point of Independence From America Day is to demand that our government leads an independent, non-aligned country, not the southern-most cornerstone of someone else’s empire.
My next caller was American, too. He moved here because his nation’s foreign policy makes him sick. Let’s hope that we become a nation that he is proud to call home.
Giovanni is on air on Bay FM 99.9 this morning from 9:00 until 11:00am.