Best way I know of to celebrate this Independence Day

Go to Best Buy or FYE or wherever, and get the DVD box set of HBO's recent John Adams miniseries (came out last month, we got ours a couple of weeks ago). And watch the whole thing while waiting to go out and eat hot dogs and see fireworks this evening.

If you read this blog during the time HBO was running it, you know fully well that I thought this was one of the most masterful and poignant miniseries to have graced the medium in a very long time.

Watch John Adams, and then think about the America that Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and all those other guys worked and fought to give us... compared to the America that we have today.

"Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it."

And after the movie that I watched with a friend last night there's more that I probably could say about it... but I'd already seen Mongol (back in December at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 in Austin, Texas) and I promised Phillip that I wouldn't write anymore about it 'til he did. Suffice it to say, it's ironic that such a beautiful foreign-made film could evoke so much thought about our own state of affairs.

Let's put it this way: when you see Temudjin (better known as Genghis Khan) in this movie, you'll quietly wish that we had someone like him running for President!

For what it's worth, Happy Fourth of July, my fellow Americans.

And I hope we get to celebrate many more of them.