In Defense of Fireworks

For my people, Independence Day is not a minor holiday.  It is one of the four Grand Occasions, joining Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving as a proud equal.  In my childhood, we gathered at the family ranch to celebrate each with enthusiasm, overeating, and conviviality.  And almost every Fourth of July of my life, we’ve had some sort of a fireworks display at the end of the evening.

Four years ago, there was no family gathering. We were at the peak of the pandemic, with California under a firm stay-at-home order. Some of us were rebellious enough to have considered violating the rules and going to the ranch for the sake of tradition, but we were overruled by our more cautious and obedient relations.  It was probably for the best.  But what was our alternative? With the beaches and parks closed, jurisdictions across the state cancelled all public fireworks displays. We were told to shelter grimly in place, observing America’s 244^th birthday in solitude. 

I had lived in Los Angeles long enough to know that the love of summer fireworks is deep, intense, and unquenchable.  I also knew that many people had a little extra in their bank accounts thanks to all the pandemic stimulus, and I guessed that more than a few would spend it on things that explode and light the sky.

So just before 8:00PM, as the sun set on July 4, 2020, I piled the children into the car. We left the Pico-Robertson, drove down La Cienega to Obama, Obama to La Brea. We drove up into Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights before pushing on to South Los Angeles.  Over and over, we had to stop the Hyundai because Angelenos were setting off fireworks in the street.  The earth shook. The gloaming sky was gloriously aflame.

Not my photo. And this captures only a fraction of the illicit glory.

The LAPD had promised to send up drones to monitor the city, threatening to arrest anyone putting on a pyrotechnic display. They would have had to arrest 50,000 or more. The radical left and the libertarian right have both claimed the slogan “Become Ungovernable” as their own.  Conservatives like to mock Californians for their willingness to submit to government micromanagement, but there was no acquiescence to authority on this night. There was only cacophony, and it was good and glorious.  

As I drove the kids about, I put on a playlist of patriotic songs: plenty of John Philip Sousa and various traditional anthems. (“Columbia, Gem of the Ocean” is underrated. Mine is probably the last generation to learn it in school.) I played two different versions of “This Land is Your Land” as we drove along Slauson and Crenshaw. Heloise and David sang along.

I kept thinking of a famous line from another song I wasn’t playing.  “I’m gonna kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight,” the Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn sang decades ago.  I saw my city kicking darkness in joy and in fury.  To see it put a lump in my throat.  

We were six weeks past the death of George Floyd and the riots that followed; I saw anti-police graffiti on countless buildings. These were not folks worried about being spotted by a police drone. And they were not alone. I already knew from social media that similar illegal fireworks displays were rocking, roiling, and lighting up small towns in red state America.  It struck me that the good citizens of South Los Angeles and rural South Carolina (or South Dakota, or South Texas) might not share the same politics, but they shared the same defiant fondness for pops, bangs, and flashes.  There are precious few things that unite such disparate communities, but fireworks are one of them. 

On this night, at least, we were (and are) all ungovernable. In that dark and uncertain summer of 2020, it  was a comfort to realize it.

Not all find fireworks celebratory or comforting.

A Margaret Renkl op-ed in the New York Times today pleads, Enough with the Fireworks Already.

…surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be “American” to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

Perhaps it is selfish to set off fireworks. Perhaps we should sit in quiet repentance, reflecting on the monstrous harm Americans have done to the planet and their fellow humans, and when we’re done, have a silent vegan supper at the local homeless shelter. Perhaps we should, as Renkl pleads, “plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.”

I hear you, ma’am.  I hear your earnest entreaty, and I trust your good intentions. But let me tell ya, fireworks do very much “give life meaning and joy.” 

At the heart of what it means to be human is to do what we can to keep the night at bay. Our ancestors lit fires to keep warm, to cook food, to keep away savage beasts, but above all else, to feel less afraid of an otherwise unlit world.  When we wave our sparklers and shoot off our bottle rockets, we are not mere selfish vandals. We are lighting beacons, symbolizing not just a particular American freedom but an ancient defiance of the darkness.  In Beowulf, the shield Danes lit torches in the mead hall to better brave Grendel and his fearsome mama. In America, we shoot off fleeting pyrotechnics for more or less the same reason. We’re gonna kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

In the late summer of 1939, as the world turned again to a terrible war, a young English writer offered a vital reminder of human perseverance.  Auden’s most famous poem concludes:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Fireworks are those fleeting, affirming, and very necessary flames. Bring them on.