The "Golden" Era

Memories and Milestones

I only have the vaguest memories of America’s 200th birthday, back when everyone learned the word “bicentennial.”

Most of what I remember is personal—every year, our family hosted a July 4th party for neighbors and relatives and family friends, which I’ve written about here before. I just went and reread that episode to fill myself once more with the feelings.

July 4, 1976 was special in that we ended up doing a neighborhood parade, where we wove streamers into our wheels, wrapped our bicycles, attached flags, the whole works. There were these hard straws that came in different colors that could be clipped onto our spokes, and we would clothespin baseball cards to the struts so that the wheels clicked as they rotated. My first bike was made by John Deere and thus yellow and green, so it was quite the process to wrap and decorate it in order to fully express the red, white, and blue.

When I say parade, I mean basically that we kids spent hours preparing our bikes and big wheels, and then took them to the top of the hill a couple of times so that we could coast down in front of our parents who took photos, applauded, etc. Looking back on it, I suspect they were mostly grateful to have us out of their hair for an entire afternoon, taking hours to prepare for what probably wasn’t much more than a 10-minute event (and prelude to our big 4th of July party). But fifty years later (!!), it’s one of the few things I remember specifically about those days.

My memories of 1976 are certainly filtered through kid-colored glasses, but it felt like the Bicentennial was such a big deal at the time. It seemed like everyone was looking forward to it, a milestone celebration for a country that had very recently suffered through some hard times. Perhaps if I’d been older at the time, my enthusiasm might have been tempered by the oil crisis or Nixon’s resignation, to say nothing of Vietnam. It couldn’t have be an easy time, but I don’t remember it feeling quite this hard.

a photo of the “thousands and thousands” of people attending the Great American State Fair

Ten years ago, a bipartisan committee was formed to begin preparations for the country’s 250th birthday, organized under the auspices of the Smithsonian and designed to take place nationwide in collaboration with state and local organizations. Perhaps you’ve heard about what ensued, the Swamp King’s decision to form his own committee, deny the Smithsonian’s permits, and then divert more than $100 million of taxpayer money to stage a “spectacular,” self-aggrandizing rally. Not all of the money for this will come from our pockets; there will be a separate Freedom250 “reception” for private (corporate) donors who’ve kicked in more than a million dollars each to support the PragerU Freedom Trucks or the embarrassing Arc de Trump. After all, it wouldn’t be truly representative of the current regime without some corruption to frost the birthday cake, a little bonus for their wealthy enablers.

Mirror, mirror, on the Mall, who runs the greatest grift of all?

Whether it’s watching them pour acid into the Reflecting Pool, or seeing the state showcases comprised of 2 chairs in front of a poster, or watching the White House crop out the guitarist whose sunglasses revealed the truth about crowd size, it’s been a busy week of folks dunking on the proceedings in DC. A couple of my regular reads are from people who actually visited the festivities. From Dave Karpf:

That’s what it most reminds me of: it’s a digital Potemkin Village. They didn’t bother to create a real fair, or bring people together to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. They just threw something together that would look good-enough for the propaganda outlets, and called it a day….And what visiting the Great American State Fair reminds you of is that our current government just doesn’t do the hard work any longer.

Tara McMullin’s account is similar, although she frames it more philosophically:

One might expect that a Great American State Fair would have a strong connection to the past. After all, that’s the operative slogan—Make America Great Again—and the euphemistic valor of “heritage.” But there was no discernible connection to the past. Nor was there a credible connection to a future. The event, in my brief experience of it and in media accounts, seems to have no anchor to time at all.

There is a part of me that feels the same schadenfreude that’s circulating widely over this. There are three operative modes for the Swamp King: destroying everyone else’s efforts (and stealing their resources), overwriting other people’s work to claim it as his own (sometimes with superglue!), or resorting to pale imitation if those first two options aren’t available. All three are on full display at his Fair, in a space practically on the front lawn of the organization that spent a full decade preparing what would have been a great, national celebration. That’s perhaps the most disappointing part of this. The administration could simply have relied upon 10 years of bipartisan planning, the high profile artists who were willing to perform for free to support the nation, and the residual goodwill of a population that is fully capable of appreciating the country’s aspirations and ideals. They could have done this, swept in at the last minute, and even pretended that they were responsible. But our so-called leadership is constitutionally incapable of supporting anything that doesn’t feed wholeheartedly into their pathological delusions.

Once the momentary dopamine wears off, though, I’m left with sadness more than anything, which is why I’ve spent the past couple of days in my memories of our July 4 parties, the county and state fairs I’ve been to, and my faint recollections of the bicentennial. Ironically enough, the World Cup, run by the only organization that may rival our country’s leadership when it comes to corruption¹, has actually been pretty successful as a showcase of international partnership, celebration, hospitality, and the like. McMullin notes how, at one end of it, “the ‘fair’ morphed into a World Cup viewing area” and honestly, who could blame them?

Fifty years later, we’ve got many of the same problems, some new ones besides, and our country is being run by someone who can’t even pretend for a day that it’s not about him. Maybe it’s my own brand of delusion, but I still believe that most of us are closer to that 7-year old wrapping his bike with red, white, and blue streamers than we are to someone who’s almost certainly never set foot on a fairgrounds in his life, cosplaying at patriotism, and channeling hundreds of millions of our dollars to his cronies to produce a cheap knockoff of what we actually deserve. Despite it all, I’ll be celebrating tomorrow with a social media fast and a faint glimmer of hope. Long is the way and hard…

Happy birthday to US. More soon.

1. Say what you will about FIFA, but the one virtue they seem to possess is the ability to step out of their own way when the Cup is actually happening. Stadiums aren’t filling with Sepp Blatter or Gianni Infantino fans, although if one of them were willing to sit on the bench in the dunk tank, it’d probably draw a crowd.