O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

— “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates, revised 1911 version for July 4th

The song whose lyrics you see above is an anthem for America, and seeing as how it is July 4th today, I figured that it might be a sensible idea to go look at the sentiments that bound the nation that we once knew as “America”.

Those sentiments were most poetically and beautifully expressed in that lovely poem by Katharine Lee Bates, which has since become the country’s national hymn. In large swathes of the country, it is still sung and respected and appreciated by the (largely white) people of the hamlets, villages, towns, and minor cities that dot the American landscape.

To those people, that poem, and the song that came from it about 16 years later, has real weight and life. It summarises how those people – mostly white, mostly descended from Europeans, mostly Christian, and living in sparsely populated communities that are spread out across the vast expanse of the American landscape – feel about their nation.

And make no mistake: it is a great nation.

This, very roughly speaking, is what that nation looks like:

It is a nation of wonders and riches. It is a nation of golden corn fields that stretch out into the horizon. It is a nation of magnificent lakes and mountains and forests.

It is also a nation of sleepy little towns connected by highways and interstates, where everything increasingly looks more or less the same. It is also a nation suffering from a severe opioid addiction crisis, with skyrocketing rates of overdosing from drugs that are quite legal, and quite lethal.

It is a nation that I love, bumps, warts, and all.

But in the big cities and liberal/progressive coastal enclaves, populated so heavily by what a certain retired Lieutenant Colonel of God’s Own Army likes to call the International Community Of The Ever So Caring And Sensitive (ICOTESCAS), that very same hymn represents a song of oppression and slavery, a song that celebrates the very worst human impulses.

To them, there is nothing “great” about America, which is why their newspaper of record, Pravda – er, excuse me, The New York Times – publishes a nonsensical opinion video that claims that America isn’t great, merely okay, and it gets taken seriously by the people of that nation.

Curiously, these same numbnuts never stop to ask themselves why it is that everyone and his dog from Central America, and from darkest Africa, and from poorest Asia, wants to come to America to take advantage of that mere okayness. If America is merely okay, then why would anyone want to leave other merely okay nations and go to America?

Moreover, if America is merely okay, why is it that all of the boats are going from Cuba to Miami, and not the other way? Why is it that every few months a few thousand more Dirt Worlders mass on America’s southern border to try to invade their way into the good life – but no white Christian Americans want to reciprocate by invading Mexico?

Why is it that Nogales, Arizona has clean drinkable tap water and functional public utilities, while Nogales, Mexico, is a crime-ridden shithole where drinking the tap water will give you dysentery?

Such things escape the people of that other nation. And that is because they are firmly detached from reality.

This is what that nation looks like:

Despite its relative isolation from reality, that nation comprises roughly half of the population of the entire United States of America.

Consider that for a moment. Half of the country that is celebrating its independence today from an overweening, foolish, out-of-control, heavy-handed imperial power, has almost nothing in common with the other half.

And that other half is the part of the nation that supplies the food, transportation networks, electricity, factory outputs, and high-tech industrial expertise, that gives the liberal half of the country what they need in order to survive.

July 4th is a celebration of a nation’s independence – but these days it is worth asking if that nation even exists anymore.

An objective assessment of the facts on the ground tells us that it does not.

By what measure is America a “nation” anymore when its duly and Constitutionally elected President announces a grand military parade that celebrates America’s vast kinetic strength and wealth, and the media elites and roughly half of the country promptly lose their minds and call him a dictator?

By what measure can America be called a “nation” anymore when its people do not share a common skin colour, faith, language, history, or culture – especially given that the inhabitants of the Clinton Archipelago are in the middle of tearing down everything about American history that they find inconvenient?

And by what measure is is possible to think of America as a “nation” when (((specific racial groups))), who were definitively not the ones for whom the American nation itself was originally founded, wield utterly disproportionate influence upon the levers of government power on behalf of (((their))) own nation, whose interests are often completely opposed to America’s?

The American nation is a convenient fiction these days. The territory of the United States of America is mostly one contiguous landmass, except for Alaska and Hawaii, but the reality on the ground is very different. The country has split itself into armed camps that are extremely hostile to each other, and it will not be much longer before the tinderbox is lit and the flames of war rage out of control.

So by all means, let us celebrate July 4th and take pride and pleasure in the vast goodness and greatness of America – for that is what America really is, a wonderful country full of lovely people who treat guests politely and respectfully, and expect that their guests will in turn obey their own laws and norms. I was a guest of that land for 12 years, and I am eternally grateful to the American people for giving me the opportunity to live, study, and work there in a land of peace and plenty.

But, as with an elderly relative whose time to meet the Reaper is drawing near, let us also keep in mind that there may not be too many such birthdays left to cherish.

Let’s make the most of this one while we can.

Happy Birthday, America, the beautiful, the gracious, the welcoming, the greatest nation of all. May God shed His grace on thee, for whatever time that remains to you.