4 July—The Monitor’s Fourth of July Disquisition will, as usual (for the Fourth of July, anyway), be refreshingly brief. This year it will feature a recording of John Philip Sousa himself conducting his band in 1929, playing—you guessed it—“The Stars and Stripes Forever” at the proper tempo. Note that it’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” just like “The Litchfield Monitor” and “The New Yuck Times” and the definite article Hammacher Schlemmer gives to everything in its mailings.

Sousa wrote that he composed “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on Christmas Day in 1896 in the middle of the Atlantic, on his way home from a vacation in Europe. With his wife. His band first performed it in 1897. Congress made it the official March of the United States of America 90 years later.

Sousa later wrote lyrics for his march, but they’re eminently forgettable.

So Happy Independence, Independence From Meat, and Indivisible Day . . .