Semiquincentennial

"My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth."

-Abraham Lincoln

This morning's revelation, courtesy of the Atlantic, was that we actually have not one but two organizations curating the events that celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country's mission statement and founding.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-250-great-american-state-fair/687456/

Just in case it's firewalled, the gist of the article is that long ago Congress created the bipartisan America 250 group, which has spent years organizing the events that were to take place in the days leading up to July 4, 2026, and thereafter. Apparently their political agnosticism was too much for Dear Leader, whose minions created a competing organization, Freedom 250, to manage a slate of vulgar events funded by his plutocratic benefactors. Then he pulled the plug on funding America 250, and turned this moment of national reflection and celebration into just another MAGA rally.

My favorite event on the slate is the Great American State Fair, ironically named given that it's actually not in a state at all, but rather in our federal capital, the District of Columbia. These guys don't get anything right. And now several states have eschewed the event, saying they don't want to be visual aids in a partisan advertisement for the white Christian nationalists.

So when you heard about a bunch of performers pulling out of the July 4th celebration in Washington, it was because they were misled into thinking they were there as part of the bipartisan event, when in fact it's become something quite different.

I'm old enough to remember the bicentennial. I turned twelve that summer, and we were living in Orange, California. 1976 was a rough year for this country--in the space of a few short years we'd endured defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, a massive energy crisis and attendant inflation. Like today, a partisan divide opened over who was to blame for all that. Unlike today, the overwhelming consensus seemed to be that, although we needed to reflect on our values and how to address what had gone wrong that decade, it was still a pretty great thing to be an American.

I mean, you had Elton John singing about the joys of living alone as a single man in a big city (one had to draw the inference from that) in Philadelphia Freedom.

You had tall ships from all over the world sailing into New York harbor to share in our celebration, with our most iconic symbol of American hope and opportunity lighting the background.

I remember a summer festooned with red, white, and blue, and the ubiquitous bicentennial logo.

Maybe my memories of those days are clouded by my youth at the time, or colored by the fact that I grew up in a fairly patriotic household. I just remember an excitement and a sense of coming together that I don't feel now.

Our plan for the big holiday, as it now stands, looks a lot like every other Fourth--we'll cook, we'll hang around together, we'll watch fireworks after sunset. It's still an open question whether our venue for all that will be Corning, where the views of the fireworks will likely be spectacular, or up at Canandaigua watching our lakefront neighbors put on their own pyrotechnic display. I don't foresee myself looking back on this event with the same wistfulness I feel for that time a half-century ago--it's just another victim of this movement that slips a turd into every national punchbowl.