Common Sense with Fireworks 🇺🇸💥(VIDEO)

A reading from Thomas Paine's influential work recorded last year on Independence Day

Last year on July 4th, I walked over with three friends to Bernal Heights. Along with hundreds of other people, we climbed San Francisco’s famous hill to watch the fireworks display happening across the city. Two from our group also had a plan to read out the first few paragraphs of Thomas Paine's Common Sense.

As you will see and hear, the fireworks across the city were epic and the words were too! And I decided to make suitably-themed captions for today. 🇺🇸

How timely was the child’s scream, given the words that were spoken at that same moment?

Bonus points for anyone who notices the earrings I was wearing (you can only see one of each near the beginning of the video and right at the end).

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What Sane human doesn’t love Common Sense?

Published in 1776, the 47 page pamphlet challenged the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy. The plain language that Paine used spoke to the common people of America and was the first work to openly ask for independence from Great Britain.

From the Jack Miller Center:

Common Sense made a clear case for independence and directly attacked the political, economic, and ideological obstacles to achieving it. Paine relentlessly insisted that British rule was responsible for nearly every problem in colonial society and that the 1770s crisis could only be resolved by colonial independence.

(Um, it’s still the case.)

And, as I wait for the video to upload, I see that Matt Taibbi has just sent out a post about Common Sense too:

I read two things before bed last night. The first was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, whose popularity in early 1776 was key in convincing colonists to make a full break from England, a position considered radical even after the first revolutionary battles the year before. Through an academic’s lens, Common Sense is an exposition on the evils of monarchy and an impassioned argument for independence. On a line-by-line level, it’s more a standup routine about how people end up saddled with governments. You could imagine young Eddie Izzard doing it as a set called Kings and Other Tossers.

Paine imagines a “small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth.” Things are fine until they relax and let themselves go a little. “This remissness,” he says, highlights “the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.” The one-liners flow. “Some convenient tree will afford them a State House,” Paine groans, then spins the construction of the inevitable bureaucracy. Meetings of the community are soon replaced by a “select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake,” but they develop their own interests. As a result, regular elections now need to be held to keep the new permanent class of politician-donkeys in check, so “their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent reflection of not making a rod for themselves.”

Common Sense frames the basic American attitude. We’re scum, but at least we admit it; not scum in robes, like the English.

Please note that it’s somewhat funny for me to read the above as I’m technically British, and technically English and, as of many years now, also American.

But really I’m human¹.

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A reminder to subscribe to learn more about the documentary I’m working on:

Introducing 'Wake The Folk Up': A Common Sense Documentary Film

Another essential reminder: we are the boss of Government, not vice versa.

Our Right To Abolish Government

And finally a fantastically accurate song (it’s in the post I just embedded, but in case you miss it):

Happy Fourth of July! Freedom, Independence and Interdependence to all!

1. A piece coming soon about how I have changed my mind about certain concepts I bring up in this video.