July 4, 2000
Los Angeles, California

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Sarah Vowell, author, critic, radio personality. We here at Open Letters are publishing it today, and leaving it up tomorrow, in honor of Independence Day, the American national holiday.

When I realized last week that the Fourth was approaching, I wrote to Sarah and asked her if she’d be interested in writing a letter about the holiday, and the republic for which it stands.

Personally, I’ve always had more of aDazed and Confused take on the holiday, as in the memorable line that Ms. Stroud shouts to her stoner 1976 social-studies class as they leave for summer holidays:

This summer when you’re being inundated by all the American bicentennial fourth of July brouhaha, don’t forget you’re celebrating the fact that a bunch of slave-owning aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.

But then again, I’m Canadian. Sarah is American, as she’d be the first to tell you; she’s also the author of Take The Cannoli, a wise and funny collection of essays about the American landscape. (It is also, as of this writing, Amazon’s #11 best-selling book in Kalamazoo, Michigan.) And so I suspected that Sarah might have a slightly more thoughtful approach to the holiday than I did.

Sarah suggested that a good place for her to ponder American patriotism, circa 2000, might be in an overstuffed reclining stadium seat at her local Manhattan multiplex, watching Mel Gibson kick a little Redcoat ass. I agreed, and offered to pay for the popcorn. Today’s letter is the result.

One of my many hopes for Open Letters is that the form of the letter will expand to include many different types of writing: memoirs, reportage, how-to’s, essays. Sarah’s letter, today, is the first to venture into the territory of film criticism (if you don’t count Noah Cowan’s brief appreciation of Im Kwon Taek’s “Run Far Fly High Kae-Byok!” last week). As she so often did in her frequently groundbreaking and occasionally heartbreaking column in Salon, and as she consistently does inher stories for This American Life, Sarah has managed to push the envelope in which Open Letters resides to new dimensions.

In other Open Letters news: Weekly subscribers to Open Letters received their ready-to-print PDF issue on Sunday, which included the previous week’s contents, all nicely laid out in two-column Palatino type, plus a new letter from the editor, and a few remarkable color action photos of Sam and Zak, our philosopher-smokers. I have received email from a number of readers who want to subscribe to the weekly, but who’ve had trouble with the subscribe buttons. That is our fault; we’ll fix that soon. But for now, an alternate method to subscribe to the weekly: just send a blank email to weekly@openletters.net.

And finally, coincidence-watchers, please note: in her letter, Sarah refers to Woody Allen’s failed-suicide scene in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” which just happens to take place right before he wanders into the Marx Brothers movie at the Metro. Coincidence?

Yours truly,

Paul Tough