THE REVOLUTIONARY DREAM

Thoughts on the Fourth of July

If you’re anything like me, current events mostly piss you off, and they have for a long time. For me, I can remember the exact date I looked behind the curtain and had to pay attention to that man I found standing there. It was August 5, 1964 an Important Date in American History. For me personally, it was the day I was forced to admit that the American Dream I had been raised on and the American Reality I was in the midst of were two different things. I’ll write more about that on the anniversary when it arrives next month.

For the past 57 years, I have been in one way or another trying to find a way to resolve that difference. It’s easy to see this country as being far different - a place founded on slavery and genocide, where “all men (humans) are equal” is at best a bad joke. But I still come back to that dream, that ideal.

That’s the dream of the American Revolution. It’s never dimmed. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, when they sat down and argued what to say in the Declaration of Independence, may have had a much different understanding their words and goal when they said “all men are created equal,” but the moment it was said, the moment it was written, it was never going to be limited to white males of property. Every person who ever read it or heard it said “Yeah, that’s for me” And that’s why for the past 245 years people have come here, and why people have striven to make that true. This is the only country founded on a revolutionary ideal, the ideal of equality of all. There are those who say the French and Russian Revolutions were more “authentic” revolutions, but millions of people didn’t risk everything after those events to go to the land of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or the land where the workers of the world had nothing to lose but their chains. They’ve come here, and by their coming every year, they keep the dream alive, because they arrive with it in their hearts.

They might be a religious refugee, like my ten-times-great grandfather, a Quaker refugee from the Thirty Years War, the deadliest religious conflict in European history; they might be a political refugee like my former neighbor, Roberto Rodriguez, who fled the death squads of El Salvador for the crime of believing in a union; they might be a three-year old girl born in a refugee camp, who first saw America when she looked out the porthole of the troopship that brought her and her family from a war-torn Europe, and saw the Lady in the Harbor and knew she would be safe, as my life partner remembers her first experience of America. None of them had easy lives after they got here, but my ancestor’s community became the first group of Europeans anywhere to make the non-ownership of slaves a condition of membership in their community; Roberto met another refugee from the wars in Guatemala and they had a son who today is a doctor at Cedars-Sinai here in Los Angeles; my partner became an artist and a political activist, one of the “Friends of Jane” at the University of Chicago (look it up). And what each of them did contributed to the dream, to keeping it alive for others.

They might be like my friend, the late Colonel Steve Pisanos, who I was privileged to know for 30 years. When he said “My life is the American Dream,” he meant it.

Back in 1935, 14-year old Spiros Pisanos, son of a poor streetcar motorman in Athens, discovered his life’s dream, when he saw airplanes of the Greek Air Force fly overhead and land at a nearby airfield. He ran after them onto the field, where the pilots let him see them closer. And then, when he said “I would like to be a pilot,” one of them laughed and told him, “Sorry, boys like you don’t become pilots in Greece.” “That night I went home and told my father I was going to America, where all things are possible, and I would fly.”

In 1939, age 18 and still poor, Spiros got a job on a ship sailing to America. He knew so little about the place that he didn’t know there was a North and South America. After two trips to South America, they docked in Baltimore, and he “jumped ship.” In modern terms, Spiros Pisanos was an “undocumented immigrant.” He met a frellow Greek who ran a restaurant, washed dishes for two months and then caught the train to New York City. On his travel back and forth to his job shucking oysters at Delmonico’ s he taught himself English with a Greek-English dictionary and the day’s issue of the New York Post.

Over the course of the next year, he started taking flying lessons, and by the summer of 1941 he had a Private Pilot’s license. Along the way, he’d learned the Royal Air Force was looking for pilots. Padding his logbook with 200 non-existent hours, he went to Canada where the Royal Canadian Air Force took him in. He arrived in England in the spring of 1942; by that summer he was a member of 71 Eagle Squadron, “the Yanks in the RAF.” That September, the boys who couldn’t get in the U.S. Army Air Force were now the most experienced group of American fighter pilots in the world, and the Air Force was glad to welcome them. At that moment, it was discovered that Spiros, who had become “Steve” along the way, wasn’t an American. The Congress had just passed a law that allowed immigrants accelerated citizenship if they served in the U.S. armed forces, and on September 27, 1942, Spiros “Steve” Pisanos became the first immigrant to take advantage of the opportunity, becoming an “Officer and a gentleman by Act of Congress” in the U.S. Army Air Forces on September 30.

Long story short, over the next two years, Steve became an ace, was shot down and worked with the French Resistance, finally taking part in the Liberation of Paris. No less that Walter Cronkite called him “The most interesting individual I met in the entire Second World War.” After the war, he became an Air Force test pilot, remaining in the Air Force for the next 30 years. His final assignment came in 1970, when he was appointed U.S. Air Attache in Athens. Ostensibly there to assist the Hellenic Air Force in bringing the F-4 Phantom into service, his real mission - as the best-known Greek fighter pilot in the world - was to find those air force officers who would support an end to the dictatorship of “The Colonels,” an “anti-communist” coup that happened in 1967 with at least the tacit knowledge and support of the CIA. In 1974, in the aftermath of the Greek defeat by Turkey in the Cyprus War, the regime fell. When he left to return home at the end of his tour, Colonel Spiros “Steve” Pisanos, son of a poor streetcar motorman, who had found that “In America, everything is possible,” was awarded the George Cross, Greece’s highest honor, for helping restore democracy in the land of its birth.

Ladies and gentlemen: that, I submit, is a story that couldn’t happen in any other country. Just as the stories of everyone else who came here believing that “In America, everything is possible” could not have happened anywhere else. The dream of the Revolution is what’s important about this country, the thing that makes this place different from everywhere else.

On June 24, 1826, the 50th year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, former President and author of the Declaration, 83 year old Thomas Jefferson, was asked by Roger Weightman to come to Washington D.C. to participate in the celebration of the anniversary. He was in declining health (he and John Adams would both die on that day of days), and wrote to apologize for not being able to accept the offer. Fifty years later, he had come to see some of the larger meaning of the words he and John Adams and the other members of the committee who had been charged to write the Delaration had put to paper.

He wrote:

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

So far, we have been able - with many delays and detours - to stick to that path. The greatest threat to that revolutionary dream stands tall around us today, which makes this Fourth of July one of the most important since the day the words “all men are created equal” was first heard. It’s our belief in that revolutionary dream that is why we are involved politically and socially as we are. We may not have achieved the ideal, we may never completely do so, but if we fail to stand for it now, it will be lost, possibly forever.

(You can read Steve’s whole adventure in his autobiography, “The Flying Greek” https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Greek-Immigrant-Fighter-Resistance/dp/1597970786/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Pisanos+-+%22The+Flying+Greek%22&qid=1625255955&s=books&sr=1-1)