American Fun Read Online Free Page A

scene, felt the same duty to save the people’s music that the Patriots felt to American liberty. Fearing it was “falling into fattened hands”—the hands of Capitol and EMI—she and her ragged CBGB crowd envisioned themselves “as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll.” As she remembers it, “We would call forth in our minds the image ofPaul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioningthe people to wake up, to take up arms. We would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.”
    B-boys and punks, like revolutionary Patriots, exulted in their youth. Both generations strutted in primitivecostumes that set their law-abiding elders’ teeth on edge. Both invented do-it-yourself technologies—for publication, gathering, food, and shelter—that sidestepped corporations and the king, respectively. The Patriots had the likes ofSamuel Adams andJames Otis, leaders who inspired the lowliest dockworkers to believe they could form a republic of rough and active citizens. B-boys and B-girls were lightning-tongued MCs who honored the earliest black folk traditions—vocal, musical, fiercely athletic. Punks had insanely high-energy rock bands who inflamed their minds with a fierce new ethics—againstcommercialism, against race prejudice, against all that phonyyuppie bullshit.
    In past decades there’s been a national explosion in bold, loud,political merriment. From anti–World Trade Organization rallies togay pride parades to the range of ethnic holidays, identity groups from throughout the population have tapped into the nation’s heritage of fun for ways to come together, be seen, and be heard. More than ever, despite a runaway entertainmentindustry that would keep the people warming its seats, Americans are deliberate about having their fun. For some, it’s the civil way to rebel. For some—like the thousands atBurning Man or the Sturgis, South Dakota, Motorcycle Rally—rebellion is just the best reason to party.
    But at a time when both theBoston Tea Party can be trademarked by drug companies and average citizens take onWall Street, it is important to revisit the origins of rebellion. For even when the stakes were highest—for Patriots, for slaves, forforty-niners—the pioneers in American fun managed to keep the battle civil. Full of crazy punk-rock courage, they dove into the crowd with big bloody smiles and
surfed
the citizens’ dangerous passion.

1
----
TheForefather of American Fun
    O N THE ELEVENTH DAY of the eleventh month in the year of 1620, forty-one men shuffled on the decks of a creaky cargo ship. They had been bobbing for weeks within Cape Cod’s fingertip; most of them had not yet stepped foot on land. Despite three months of animosity and sickness, they lined up to sign a binding social contract. The signers represented less than half of the ship’s passengers, and the majority were like-minded “Separatist”Pilgrims, but otherwise they were a pretty motley crew: merchants, preachers, a physician, a tailor, a soldier of fortune, an indentured servant, even a mutineer named Billington who would become the first hanged man onPlymouth Plantation. The document, of course, was the Mayflower Compact.
    Some four hundred years later, many hold up this paper as the earliest vestige of American democracy. If you read it the right way, you can almost see it: the undersigned came together in a “civill body politick” and agreed to obey laws that would be “most meete & convenient for the generall good of the Colonie.” When you read it in its proper context, however, you see that it guarantees the authoritarian system that theSeparatists had in mind for New England. The “generall good” was of course the Separatist good, anchored in devotion toCalvinistlaw. More to the point,those who trace America’s democratic tradition back to the makeshift Mayflower Compact—from framers of