WAR ON FIREWORKS: A response to the New York Times.

The LAPD had promised to send up drones to monitor the city, threatening to arrest anyone putting on a pyrotechnic display. They would have had to arrest 50,000 or more. The radical left and the libertarian right have both claimed the slogan “Become Ungovernable” as their own. Conservatives like to mock Californians for their willingness to submit to government micromanagement, but there was no acquiescence to authority on this night. There was only cacophony, and it was good and glorious.

As I drove the kids about, I put on a playlist of patriotic songs: plenty of John Philip Sousa and various traditional anthems. (“Columbia, Gem of the Ocean” is underrated. Mine is probably the last generation to learn it in school.) I played two different versions of “This Land is Your Land” as we drove along Slauson and Crenshaw. Heloise and David sang along.

I kept thinking of a famous line from another song I wasn’t playing. “I’m gonna kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight,” the Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn sang decades ago. I saw my city kicking darkness in joy and in fury. To see it put a lump in my throat.

As a kid I was a big fan of Henry Reed’s Journey, one theme of which was the annoying spread of anti-fireworks laws.