July 5

One thing I like about market holidays is that they lay bare the myriad absurdities inherent in the way humans conduct their affairs.

Holidays “observed” on days other than the holiday itself are even more instructive in that regard.

Just like all citizens in all countries, Americans tell themselves manifestly silly stories about their own history. July 4 is a good (albeit not the quintessential) example.

Generally speaking, we like to pretend that a handful of enlightened “Fathers” decided to dedicate themselves to the cause of democratic governance based on principles of equality and the zealous defense of certain “unalienable Rights.” In pursuit of that noblest of noble ends, it was necessary to throw off the bonds of monarchs and any other governing authority not explicitly “deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.”

That’s a great story. But a more honest telling finds a (technically treasonous and, on some interpretations, ungrateful) group of settlers wary of subservience to an authority stationed an ocean away deciding that, rather than persist as a colony, it would be preferable to tell said authority to p-ss off in the name of purportedly immutable truths which, in reality, don’t exist. Knowing push would invariably come to shove, those settlers resolved themselves (and doomed their fellows) to a protracted gunfight. Some folks died. But, as is usually the case in war, not the people who started the fight. Most of them lived and became officials of some sort.

Obviously, there’s no such thing as “unalienable Rights.” That’s not to say those rights, as expounded, weren’t (or aren’t) worth fighting for to the extent they make the human condition more bearable. It’s just to say that they aren’t “unalienable” and they really aren’t “rights,” as such. Together, they’re just a list of prescriptive norms seen as conducive to shared happiness and prosperity. “Not nothin’,” to be sure. But not immutable. And certainly not “endowed” by any deity.

Further, it so happened that our hero settlers were only dedicated to protecting those “unalienable Rights” as it related to people who looked just like them — namely, white men, and preferably those who owned property. That’s a peculiar definition of “unalienable,” and an even stranger interpretation of “all men.”

In any case, circling back to what I said here at the outset, we (market participants) spend each and every weekday tacitly and implicitly perpetuating the idea that financial assets are real things, that corporations are tantamount to people for a variety of legislative and bookkeeping purposes and that all of this is somehow independent enough from us that we’re “participants” in it. We talk of bond yields and stock prices as though they have a sense of purpose distinct from us and our engagement with corporations is, in almost all cases, predicated on the idea that Nike or Toyota are somehow entities that exist apart from the people who run them.

None of that is true, of course. I often use weekends to illustrate the point.

It’s hilarious that, on Friday, we write and speak about what dire “consequences” the bond market might have in store for us if we fail to pacify it by implementing austerity measures or, at the least, paying lip service to purportedly immutable truths about the inherent goodness of balanced federal budgets. If we don’t sacrifice a goat to the bond market, it might decide, of its own accord, to punish us with higher yields, rendering us unable to borrow (in a currency we ourselves issue).

Then, on Saturday, we simply flip off the switch. It stays in the “off” position on Sunday too, because that’s when we direct our idolatry to another god. On Monday, we tune “Him” out (and it’s not just the Almighty who has to be a “He,” in some traditions, priests have to be men too, because after all, “He” had a son, not a daughter) to worship the bond market again.

What can we say about July 5, then?

Well, it’s a holiday predicated on revisionist history rife with contradictions, including the wildly ridiculous idea that people who owned slaves would presume to declare themselves protectors of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

Only, not. Because that’s July 4. July 5 is the day after July 4, and it’s a weekday. So, according to custom, we should be dressed up in matching costumes staring at numbers on screens. Only we decided not to on Monday. That’s an accidental, unconscious recognition of the fact that those numbers are meaningless and so subservient to us that we can simply declare them irrelevant on totally random days.

Note that this year is especially complex. July 4 was on a Sunday, which means some people doubtlessly skipped out on their sacred duty to worship God (with a capital “g”) in order to worship Founding Fathers (with capital “f”s). And because we reckon the latter would be aggrieved if we didn’t accord them the proper reverence by taking a day off from work to celebrate that time they committed treason in the name of universal, self-evident “truths” that turned out to be the furthest thing from universal when manual labor needed doin’, we had to skip out on worshipping the market gods on Monday.

We’re an insane species, trapped in overlapping delusions. The tragic irony is that if we abandon them, we’ll have no frame of reference and will become even crazier as disillusionment drives us all to madness.