ArcaMax

The village egg toss on the Fourth of July sings of democracy to me.

An exuberant gaggle of 100-plus people lined up for the competition. A little bit of everybody joined in, all ages, sizes and colors, with partners.

The playing field by the fire station and elementary school filled up in an overflowing line.

The price: free.

Just come as you are after the parade and the antique fire engine rides for kids.

The teenage girls with us were ready to rock the egg toss. My brother-in-law and I decided to try our hand.

Under the sun, for the first time in many months, I felt lighthearted to be in a certain place and time. The draft root beer tasted good. All of us were in this thing together, no strangers here.

I had fled from Washington, D.C., to Madison, Wisconsin. Shorewood Hills by Lake Mendota was the village where my mother grew up. This was my school as a small girl. The green summer scenery looked much the same.

Thank goodness for that, after seeing what I had seen in Washington with my Capitol press pass. Covering the halls of Congress, I could not accept what was about to happen.

The Trump tax cuts for millionaires and corporations, paid for by draconian cuts to Medicaid and other social safety net services: Surely such a heartless bill could not pass the Senate.

Well, the vote was 50-50, so the bill passed when Vice President JD Vance broke the tie.

The Senate I once revered as a rookie reporter had vanished in the midnight darkness before the dawn. Giants once walked and talked on that floor.

There came a point when I couldn't bear to watch its meek compliance with the president's command to have the massive budget bill done by the Fourth of July.

The Senate showed few shreds of independence on Independence Day. So much for being a deliberative body with high-flown debates. So much for being a coequal check on the president.

Rather, two Republican women senators huddled with the new Senate majority leader, tall John Thune of tiny South Dakota, to make a sordid deal.

Thune hog-butchered carveouts to Sen. Lisa Murkowski's state of Alaska and gave Maine's Sen. Susan Collins a pass to vote "no." Collins is up for reelection in 2026.

I thought more of Murkowski. Someone tell Lisa that she's there for the good of the nation, not just to represent a single state.

Up late to hammer it out, the women of Maine and Alaska were transparent in acting like teenage girls with the star athlete. They had their picture in the paper like chums.

A starting player for the first time, Thune sure came through for the MAGA team.

There was no time to spare for pieties or pretenses that the new law would benefit any beyond the new robber barons, Trump's special pets on display at his inauguration on Jan. 20.

(Just six months ago?)

Our own gilded tech barons are making Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, who gave back libraries and museums for the greater good, look better all the time.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse put it best, forcefully: "This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene."

His dark anger felt like a knell to the 1630 first vision of America as a "city on a hill."

The Rhode Island senator's ancestors were among the early Puritans seeking a "Mayflower compact" of self-government, an ocean apart from England's king.

(Note, politerati: Trump has bigger things in mind than king. A Roman emperor is more like it.)

Back to the egg toss. Good clean fun, a game where everyone meets as equals, from the doctors to the 6-year-olds. A yolk lands on you, but who cares? Democracy is messy.

My brother-in-law said, "We beat them," meaning the teenagers.

"Exhilarating yet tranquil," a friend of a friend said of Madison.

On Sunday, at the First Unitarian Society Meeting House, a Frank Lloyd Wright original, the congregation sang "This is my song," by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius:

"My home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams."

That's how life is supposed to be, still.

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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

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