Being a curmudgeon, I can't allow people to have fun without being compelled to point out that they are dancing in a graveyard. Such is how I felt this 4th of July. Don't get me wrong, I love Independence Day; but that is exactly why I am troubled.

Independence Day, commemorating the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, is by its nature a highly political holiday. From its inception, the 4th has been used to make political statements, from the hacking to bits of a statute of King George to make bullets in revolutionary days, to today's hometown parades, fireworks, and gales of hot air sweeping down from the nation's political podiums, the holiday has ever been about democracy at work. And that's not always pretty. Often overblown with empty rhetoric, made a mockery by the bread and circuses spectacle of the thing, and always a prime opportunity for jingoes to claim to be more truly American than the other guy, it still retains a dignity of meaning that no rhetoric can overthrow, if you know where to look.

Even those to whom mainstream America had barred the doors of the temple always had the 4th to claim for their own. The Abolitionists remade the holiday into a celebration of the end of slavery when America failed to listen. Frederick Douglass asked at his alternative Fifth of July celebration held in Rochester, New York, in 1852, "What to the Slave to the Fourth of July?" and answered, "The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

Today the moral battle being fought is over the militarization of American society, and the policy of aggressive nationalism proclaimed by the Bush cabal, and epitomized by the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. In light of history, it shouldn't surprise us that each side in the struggle over these policies seeks to use the 4th of July for their own political ends.

The Bush Administration took its dog and pony show to West Virginia, as they have on three other Independence Days during George's reign. George paid homage to the historical roots of the celebration saying, "The revolutionary truths of the Declaration are still at the heart of America: We believe in the dignity and rights of every person. We believe in freedom and equal justice, the rule of law, and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

These truths are the heart of America, but unfortunately Bush is insensitive to its rhythms. Having denied thousands the right to due process and freedom from torture, and hundreds of thousands more their right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, having arbitrarily denied freedom to so many and set up a separate and unequal system of justice to judge them that answers solely to him and the appeal from which is solely his whim, having spat on the rule of law at the very moment of his ordination, I can only assume that speaking those words burned George's tongue. I can forgive his speechwriters eliding the words of Lincoln with the principles of the Declaration, but I cannot forgive such a litany of hypocrisy.