A Group of bonobos. Photo:
We’re just a few sparklers and a sucker punch away from America’s 250th birthday. It’s times like these that I really miss my dearly departed Captain Max – both to celebrate the red, white and bonobo blue and to stand with me against these performative patriots with sucker-punching kinks. But my beloved Max, aka Pr. Maximillian Lobkowicz di Filangieri (November 8, 1943 – May 13, 2025), is gone, so what’s a weeping widow to do with her summertime red, white and blues?
No Erika Kirk prayers please!
Perhaps it’s because, even after over a year, I’m still grieving. Or maybe just watching the UFC Freedom 250 American Tsar and his casually abusive, homophobic-yet-homoerotic, war-blundering, tRump-glazing, crypto-slurping courtiers come out swinging, spitting and waving the flag – getting the summer party started by trashing the White House lawn – makes me want to spit up a little too.
Is brandishing the flag always so bad? Unfortunately, and usually, yes. Especially nowadays when waving the Old Glory is a *red flag* that signals the waver to be a performing member of the extended Trump Family Circus of Marks and Grifters – the suckers and sucker punchers.
But it wasn’t always that way, not in Bonoboville where my beloved Max and I celebrated what we then saw as our sacred American freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights, all decked out in romantic red, angelic white and bonobo blue – with extra sparkles on the 4th of July.
This numerically auspicious Fourth, my widow’s grief therapy has me roleplaying Betsy Ross, stitching together a new Max Collage of American flags and fireworks, free speech and free love. A war refugee, Max cherished the stars and stripes for their twinkling promise of freedom from the devastating war into which he was born. When he turned 18, he even enlisted, proving himself to be a crack shot, until he realized that meant killing people, as opposed to just targets. This was not Max’s idea of freedom. So, he pretended to go mad – or maybe the realization drove him mad. He threatened to reveal his superior’s secrets, promptly receiving an honorable discharge… and his freedom.
Then Max found his Great Love. No, not me (that came later)… publishing. His “reader-written” magazines – The L.A. Star (with Paul and Shirley Eberle) Love Magazine (with Willem de Ridder), Hate Magazine, Finger Magazine, God, Charles Gatewood’s Forbidden Photographs, Annie Sprinkle’s SprinkleReport, The Brentwood Bla Bla, Beverly Hills the Magazine, Meetings with Remarkable People, Speakeasy Magazine and many more – prefigured social media and tested the limits of the First Amendment. Of course, the same flag that promised him free speech shut him up from time to time, but never shut him down. Not even in death, as here I am, still telling tales of Max…
“Public Happiness”
Fun factoid: two of America’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, gained ideological inspiration for the U.S. Constitution and perhaps the Declaration of Independence from their Italian pen pal, progressive Enlightenment philosopher Gaetano Filangieri (22 August 1753 – 21 July 1788) who happened to have been Max‘s great great great great great grandfather on his mother’s side.
The 5th Prince of Satriano, Filangieri championed such radical ideas as personal liberty, equality and “public happiness.” Author of one of the most important works of the Enlightenment, The Science of Legislation, Filangieri corresponded with Franklin, and Jefferson praised Filangieri after his untimely death in a letter to Max’s great great great great grandmother, Charlotte Frendel Filangieri, Gaetano’s beloved widow.
You could say that the “pursuit of happiness” – including Filangieri’s “public happiness” with a pro-bonobo twist – flowed through Max’s DNA, but it wasn’t about bloodlines. The pursuit of public happiness – having fun while doing good (or at least not hurting anyone) – spread through Bonoboville. We waved our flags for freedom, including our personal sexual freedom – even if that meant being free to be restrained, chained and whipped like a slave – in public! Freedom is the greatest aphrodisiac – but restraint is a close second. Consenting adults only, of course (we’re the Block Institute, not the Epstein Class).
One DrSuzy-Tv show favorite was spanking a Trump impersonator with an American flagpole. Nowadays, you might call this sort of Commedia Americana a “limited hangout” or “controlled opposition,” though we called it bacchanalian pro-bonobo resistance. But little by little and then by a lot, our freedom of speech was more nonconsensually restrained, our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube channels deactivated without warning, and our community under attack, like so many sex educators, Palestine supporters and antiwar activists on the Left and Right.
As I grieve, I wonder how Max would bear witness to the current uptick in fascism, war, genocide, AI, lies, puritanical censorship and hypocrisy, the suckers and sucker punchers. I’m sure he’d speak his mind, as he always encouraged me to do, while waving the flag – with fireworks, also an aphrodisiac – sparkling foreplay, orgasms for the eye on the 4th of July.
Unfortunately, most freedom-affirming pyrotechnics are neither ecologically friendly nor safe. Pro-Tip: Don’t set off your fireworks by hand, or you could lose your fingers – and how are you going to finger someone with no fingers?
Sparklers do the trick. For America’s 250th birthday, I raise a sparkler to Captain Max, to “public happiness,” free speech, free love and the general all-around red, white and bonobo-blue freedom for which he stood.
Amen. Awomen. Goddess bless America.