The last time the United States celebrated a big birthday, the country wasn’t feeling so great about itself, either. But if America in 1976 was hungover from Watergate and Vietnam, the bicentennial was still celebrated with a national singalong conducted in the familiar key of high school civics. As corny and commercialized as that nostalgia-drenched anniversary may have been — and it was famously corny and commercialized — it did not begin with Gerald Ford celebrating his own birthday with a boxing card on the South Lawn of the White House. Trump ’s decision to stuff his own candles into America’s semiquincentennial cake with UFC Freedom 250 set the tone for everything that has followed. That was to be expected, because the UFC event was sponsored by Freedom250, a commission Trump founded with the purpose of sidelining America250, the bipartisan commission established in the summer of 2016, the last days of the pre-Trump presidency world. Freedom250 is one of two MAGA-aligned commemoration outfits — along with Task Force 250 — that have drawn funds from, and encroached on the mandate of, America250. Those pilfered funds have been used to underwrite last year’s dud of a Kremlin-style military parade, UFC Freedom 250, a road show of mobile whitewashed history museums known as Freedom Trucks and the main event of this year’s official Independence Day commemoration: the poorly attended and even more poorly constructed Great American State Fair. This split doomed the commemorations to chaos and paltriness. According to The New York Times, this split doomed the commemorations to chaos and paltriness. “When President Trump returned to office last year, he moved to exert influence over the anniversary celebrations,” explained the paper. The immediate result of Freedom250 was “confusion among state leaders and the general public about what is happening and who is in charge of the various celebrations.” With participating states expected to pay $100,000 to $1 million each to the new group, states also raised valid corruption concerns. Most of the $150 million allocated by Congress for anniversary events has instead gone into Freedom250’s nonprofit black box within the National Park Service.
This week’s fair, the crown jewel of Freedom250, has been defined by low attendance, mass cancellations by artists and shoddy construction of “a cheap scale model of a massive triumphal arch that Trump hopes to build near Arlington National Cemetery,” as Alex Shephard of The New Republic put it. As fellow TNR writer Malcolm Ferguson wrote of his time at the fair:
What was originally supposed to be a weeks-long blockbuster festival to celebrate the nation turned into a politically charged event, where even B- and C-list artists like Flo Rida, Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice and the Commodores dropped out. Soon, nearly a dozen states did too, as it became more and more obvious that Trump was using this event for partisan purposes. As everyone bailed, Trump petulantly declared the fair would instead be kicked off with a rally that he would headline — but even that didn’t get much of a turnout . That the deadly algae blooms on the National Mall have been traced back to a contractor who resembles a mob boss from a Frank Miller animated noir was only the George Washington cherry on top of an epically disastrous July 4 rollout. In the words of a Harper’s cover story on the whole fiasco, “ Happy Fucking Birthday .”
America250 did not give up on its mandate, and still has plans to hold its own events, mostly charitable block parties featuring better music and more transparent funding. The largest, in Los Angeles, will feature Queen Latifah and Smashing Pumpkins. But if America250 is the cleaner commission, it is not exactly a paragon of civic virtue, or even that interested in the spirit of America’s on-again, off-again project to expand political and economic democracy. The author of the aforementioned Harper’s article, Christopher Hooks, describes a meeting with America250’s chair, Rosa Rios — a former treasurer of the United States who is described as the last Obama holdover in Trump’s Washington — in which she presented a slide show detailing her vision and some accomplishments of the commission. “Rios opened her presentation by holding up a yellow, star-shaped plushie with a friendly face,” writes Hooks.
“I am pleased to introduce to you George the Star!” This stuffed version of the semiquincentennial’s official mascot, a Nintendo-ish five-pointer, was now available for sale in the visitor center’s gift shop for $35.95. “This is the first time I’m seeing this plushie, and no one is more excited than I am.” George looked like a fine fellow, but there was something just a little off about him. Aren’t the stars on the flag white? I searched my brain for yellow stars in American iconography, and the closest I could get was the Carl’s Jr. logo.
Rios then dove into the commission’s brand partnerships and social-media reach: one of the proudest achievements of the commission, she told us, was Beyoncé’s reference to it in an Instagram post. The singer, Rios reminded everyone, had “three hundred and eight million followers.” And thanks to a partnership with Stellantis, the Dutch parent company of Chrysler and Fiat, “you can’t turn on the TV without seeing a Jeep commercial with our logo on it, which has been amazing.”
As Hooks notes in his piece, many of the institutions that once upheld the country’s attempts to maintain a serious relationship with Early America and its ideas have fallen into disrepair, with precious little interest in putting them on a stronger footing than Freedom250s roving Freedom Trucks. “It is difficult to imagine,” he writes, “the French allowing a situation like that at the first home of the Franklin Institute, a marble building from 1825 that was once the home of Philadelphia’s history museum but is now a fenced-off ruin with hypodermic needles littering the back garden.”
As the British historian Sarah Churchwell reminds us in her essential history, “Behold, America,” the idea of America as a “city on the hill” was not originally meant in the Reaganite sense of a chosen country fulfilling a divine destiny. Rather, John Winthrop intended it to mean that, because of its clean slate with history and its talent for bluster, the fate and development of the United States would always be visible and of interest to all the world — sitting in a goldfish bowl “on a hill” for other nations to judge against our own promises. Two-hundred fifty years after independence, and almost 400 years after Winthrop coined his phrase, the world is finally tiring of watching us on our hill. Which is probably for the best when it comes to this summer’s self-immolatory commemorative belly flop, compared to which the bicentennial schlock of 1976 has the gravitas of another time, another country, another planet.
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