I remember growing up watching fireworks over the harbor with my mother. For whatever reason, it is that display that resonated with her as the show to be watched, and so it is the Boston Pops playing the 1812 Overture that has always resonated with me as the ridiculous-but-awesome thing with which America’s birthday ought to be celebrated.

Tomorrow it is America’s birthday. Tomorrow I go to Fenway and watch the Red Sox take on the Orioles (from seats which are far too good to be serious) and then head to the Esplanade and enjoy Toby Keith (how could I be so ironically lucky) and the Pops as they lead the march to fireworks.

After three celebrations of America’s birth in Washington, DC, I am confident that I don’t really care about fireworks displays. All of them tend to pale in comparison to shooting bottle rockets at each other at the gravel pits north of town on the way to Essex. So stupid. So fun. Well, yesterday’s gone, and it’s time to grow up, and so I find myself in Boston prepared to head to the Harbor.

The past two days have been great. We arrived Friday morning and headed on the ole Freedom Trail, dodging tourists and seeing what is to be seen in Boston. Temporarily derailed by exhaustion, we headed back to the hotel to check in and get our room, and arose from a nap only in time to take the floor for Lady Gaga. It was as epic as it sounds.

From there, we used our Saturday to make up for lost time, sort of: efforts to conclude the Freedom Trail were derailed by a detour along Beacon Hill and the best cocktails I’ve ever had. Old Ironsides was closed for some stupid Fourth of July thing and so we went to Harvard.

Last fall, we went to a wedding in New Haven. My conclusion was that New Haven sucks and Yale is full of pretentious dickbags. I went to Harvard expecting much the same, but came away with the conclusion that it isn’t … at least during the summer. I am extremely reluctant to give up on my Nixonian resentment toward such a storied institution, but I am on the way.

From there, with the sort of irony that I want to believe I am the champion, I headed to the suburbs to watch UFC. Tonight was the night where heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar returned from a career-threatening injury (diverticulosis, a hole in the intestine probably caused from eating too much meat, a sign of how awesome Lesnar is) to submit Shane Carwin.

This is a trip about symbolism.

It turns out the story of America is the story of farmer-warriors defeating an empire (put aside your thoughts about how Americans are patriots when they do this and Afghans are insurgents). It turns out the story of America is the story of kids from nowhere becoming president (yes, there’s two Bushes and a Kennedy in the past half-century, but there is also Obama, Clinton, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, and Eisenhower). And the story of America is about a kid from Webster, South Dakota, making his way in MMA against the best wishes of all the establishment Internet fanboys and defeating their champion, Shane Carwin.

I don’t mean anything against Carwin — truth be told, the full-time engineer and part-time fighter deserves nothing but respect, which is exactly what Lesnar gave him (largely because, unlike the rest of the establishment, he gave Lesnar the respect he deserved, criticizing him only for what even Lesnar would admit were unsporting remarks and gestures). But the bottom line is that Carwin is the choice of the establishment, and Lesnar is the one who would get the old “you ain’t from around here, are you, boy?”

And so too with Lady Gaga. No one doubts she’s crazy, but of course she isn’t. Lesnar’s victory is Gaga’s; it is a victory of the knowledgeable over the ignorant. A Gaga show combines the cliche Madonna tributes (god bless them both, but Gaga’s spark-shooting bra is clearly nothing more than a campy send-off) with truly significant moments: it is hard to watch the video interludes without thinking about the triumph of Dada through Gaga, the ultimate victory of Dali over ‘art’.

And I have not even reached the topic of the black cab driver who brought us home tonight while discussing our president, the black JFK, as a man incapable of ending the war in Afghanistan, too foolish to cut taxes to end the recession instead of contributing to the ossified bureaucracy through the stimulus — the cab driver himself too much a man of labor and a man tired of labor to deal with politics.

It is always good to get out of town.