It was Patrick O’Donahue, that fiercely proud American who was also fiercely proud of his Irish heritage, who first drilled into me the name of the holiday we celebrate this Friday.
“The Fourth of July is just a date,” said Pat, the locquacious fellow who wrote so well for the Green Bay News-Chronicle. “This is Independence Day.”
During the astoundingly long pregame show to Super Bowl XLVII on Sunday – it really did run four and a half hours – the folks at Fox presented what they said was an annual tradition: the reading of the Declaration of Independence.
This could be good, I says to myself, I says, but I doubt they’re really going to read the whole thing out loud. Too many things in there that might be uncomfortable to The Powers That Be.
Sure enough, as you can see if you’d like (or at least the video above was live on Feb. 6, 2014), the entire middle section disappeared, the one that listed all of the abuses that the tyrant George III was inflicting on the colonies. The presentation has a lengthy gap after the words “Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”
Although the existing federal government’s actions are not an exact match for George’s, there are enough similarities that reading this list out loud may have made too many people thinking, wow, what goes around comes around.
So that you don’t have to look it up, here is what they skipped on Sunday:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of
its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under
robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber
baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be
satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us
without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to
make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable
insult. To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we
may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not
yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed
with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
―
C.S. Lewis,
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
