4 July 2009, Midnight in Anchorage, Alaska
I have decided that, indeed, I really do not like fireworks. I may even hate them.
The noise smashes around the side of the building and I hear the distant cheers of what I imagine must be a cigarette smoking crowd who find great joy in loud noises perceived as masculine and thrilling. Car alarms are going off. I want nothing of it.
Additionally, I find it a huge waste of money but wonder, were it a quiet exhibit of light set to classical sounds at Disneyland, like that of my childhood, would I be so very negative? What is it about the sound that I so detest?
Simply put, fireworks remind me of the brutality of war.
Maybe there is a primal draw to this entertainment that is happily American as this sound has never truly entered the American psyche as synonymous with WAR – as dirty and unromantic – as hell where wide-eyed fearful young men die consciously choking on their own blood.
In war movies, the sound is sterilized to remove the possibility of a human visceral reaction like I have just now. Instead, one listens to fancy soundtracks made to move men and women. Move them so that when the next war stands boiling on the horizon, we, as Americans, who love big noises and big guns, will stand ready to send our sons and daughters off to their death – choking on their own blood, knowing they are dead. The inhumanity and inevitability of it all makes me sick.
I hate fireworks, I really do.
I have decided that, indeed, I really do not like fireworks. I may even hate them.
The noise smashes around the side of the building and I hear the distant cheers of what I imagine must be a cigarette smoking crowd who find great joy in loud noises perceived as masculine and thrilling. Car alarms are going off. I want nothing of it.
Additionally, I find it a huge waste of money but wonder, were it a quiet exhibit of light set to classical sounds at Disneyland, like that of my childhood, would I be so very negative? What is it about the sound that I so detest?
Simply put, fireworks remind me of the brutality of war.
Maybe there is a primal draw to this entertainment that is happily American as this sound has never truly entered the American psyche as synonymous with WAR – as dirty and unromantic – as hell where wide-eyed fearful young men die consciously choking on their own blood.
In war movies, the sound is sterilized to remove the possibility of a human visceral reaction like I have just now. Instead, one listens to fancy soundtracks made to move men and women. Move them so that when the next war stands boiling on the horizon, we, as Americans, who love big noises and big guns, will stand ready to send our sons and daughters off to their death – choking on their own blood, knowing they are dead. The inhumanity and inevitability of it all makes me sick.
I hate fireworks, I really do.
The man in the attached image framed against the Vietnam War Memorial was Raymond James Harster - A man who died of massive head and chest wounds he suffered after having stepped on a land mine. I never met this man even though he was my biological father...
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