For once, the highlight of my Independence Day was not pyrotechnics, but a small civic pilgrimage, and one most appropriate for the day. This afternoon I visited an exhibition at the central branch of the New York Public Library, where in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery, several early copies of the Declaration of Independence were on display. The intimate room homed copies of the original broadsides that were affixed or heralded on the streets of Philadelphia and New York immediately following the ratification of the document on July 4, 1776, apparently, a Thursday. The size of the Gallery created an atmosphere of civic religion, of respect for both the documents and the other visitors. A mother shared her marvel at the political vehemence of the Declaration's language stressing that if someone wrote that today he would be imprisoned. I was thinking to myself, not so fast, there is the first amendment, but then she added that that would be tantamount to igniting a revolution. Point taken, we are quire far from revolutions or even dissent.
Indeed, last Wednesday night I happened on a quite singular form of fledgling dissent: a few dozen people penned on the side of Broadway near the intersection with 42nd, a demonstration. The sight was bizarre. The demonstrators were holding and seldom bobbing handwritten placards before a speaker. The fact that he was haranguing against the bill capping carbon emissions that recently (miraculously!) cleared the House of Representatives is besides the point. The size of the gathering contrasted with its volume, for the speech was amplified by woofers worth a metallica stadium performance. The echo boomed through the midtown canyons also known as avenues. The booms aroused one's curiosity and once you detected their source the anticlimax was disorienting.
This could be a pattern, for I've seen other demonstrations similarly organized, and one in particular, in front of the MTA headquarters on Madison Ave., looked and sounded almost identical.
Is this how dissent is voiced in America today? If so, no wonder the real dissenters are invisible. Created by Ralph Ellison as a powerful racial metaphor, the figure of the invisible man briefly resurfaced in Hillary Clinton's campaign to denote the silent minorities who are under- and unrepresented. The invisible people today are the thousands of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the millions of under- and unemployed who make the statistics but seldom make our acquaintance.
In the middle of the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery two glass cases displayed the autographs of Thomas Jefferson original Declaration of Independence. This first version had been later heavily edited to expunge passages in which Jefferson condemned slavery. Jefferson had underlined the passages that had been deleted from the final version of the document. The handwriting was neatly calligraphic, but hardly legible both because of the diminutive size and the fading of the ink. On the fourth page though, one could easily make out "MEN," yes, in all capitals.
Despite its frailty the document was alive through the force of its language. It whispered that I and all the other visitors, and all the other citizens of this city and this country were here because of this document. ``... Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness ...''
