As you prepare for your Fourth of July barbecue

Sometime in the late summer of 1990--that would be after Saddam Hussein massed his army on the Kuwaiti border and before Operation Desert Storm drove him back to Baghdad--or, if you prefer, after US ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told Saddam "We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts" and before President Bush (the one who got elected on his own; the "real" one, if you like) began comparing former American client Saddam to Hitler--somewhere in that interval, CBS's "60 Minutes" ran a Diane Sawyer interview with Saddam.

I'm still looking for a transcript or a clip, but there's one moment I remember very vividly. It played out pretty much exactly like this:

Sawyer pointed out that, in Iraq, to insult Saddam was illegal, and could be severely punished.

Saddam, evidently a little surprised at the question, said, Of course--don't you have a similar law in America?

Sawyer blinked at him for an incredulous moment, the internal process of rapidly considering and discarding possible replies playing across her face, and finally said, If we did, half of the people in America would be in jail.

And at that moment, remember, the first President Bush was still a year from the point where his popularity numbers would go into a power dive; Sawyer's point was that poking fun at the president is as American as apple pie.

The plain fact is that, no matter how hard the purveyors of wedge politics work to wind up the hoople with alarums of threats--real or imagined--to this or that sacred aspect of the American way of life, idolatry just doesn't really sit comfortably with the American people.

To put it another way, "desecration" isn't part of our political vernacular. Never has been, never will be.

Our nation was founded on the principle of irreverence. It's in our blood. We made our bones by staring down a king.

You can spook Americans for a while, you can get away with lying to them for a lot longer than you might think, and you can distract them at a moment's notice. But, sooner or later, there's not a sacred cow--and that includes the flag and the president--that we won't wind up barbecuing for our Fourth of July cookout. The sacred-er, the better.

We are all of us Voltaire's children--satire is mother's milk to us.

Irreverence can't be licensed, it can be produced by unskilled labor with easily available materials, and even a seriously bruised First Amendment still protects it.

(Cartoon by Dana Summers of the Orlando Sentinel.)

[Cross-posted at Preemptive Karma ("Sacred Cows Slaughtered Daily")]