The Great American Wet Blanket

If President Biden had planned a big celebration for the 250th anniversary of American independence, Donald Trump might not have ruined everything for everyone in this semiquincentennial year.   The plans would have already been in place, and Trump wouldn't have had to change them much - and I would argue that it would have been so far along that there would likely have been no way that Trump could have made the celebration about himself, especially if a world's fair had been in the offing.

Instead, Biden decided to wimp out.

Former President Biden had been against any celebration that would be deemed partisan or political  and opted for a celebration that would focus on the nation's democratic principles - fine - but he preferred a reflective, scaled-down, sober approach to the anniversary - not fine, especially when no one spends time thinking reflectively or contemplatively in the summer!  Trump, of course, is not a contemplative or reflective person (the only reflection he's ever had was looking in the mirror, which he does at least five times day), so Biden's decision to have a low-key observance left a great deal of room for Trump to work in.  Hence the Great American State Fair, Trump's honky-tonk party on the National Mall in a degraded Washington where the reflecting pool has become an algae farm and White House has become more ghetto than Anacostia.  The fair, already plagued by sporadic power outages and melting ice cream, has gotten worse since I commented on it the other day.  Robert Van Winkle (he's a rapper, Google his name to find out his rap name, because I never refer to rappers by their noms d'etage; I only refer to chosen names of people I respect!), the last performer who didn't cancel his appearance for Trump's semiquincentennial shindig, did just that and was a no-show.  One person who did attend the celebration got so bored, he put his passion out.  (That's a personal expression of mine to describe the act of something that rhymes with "mastication.")

It's all disheartening when you imagine what could have been - a big celebration that brought people together as well as one that allowed to people to contemplate our ideals toward liberty and democratic principles.  The 1976 Bicentennial may not have been marked with all of the pageantry it deserved  (*cough cough* Expo '76 canceled, *cough cough*), but, coming as it did after a decade of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Arab Oil Embargo, it was a fun time and it brought a sense of relief to the nation, which had been through so much strife in recent memory and was looking forward to a new beginning, having gotten rid of Nixon and having put the war in Southeast Asia behind us.   If Biden hadn't been such a Debbie Downer and hadn't been primarily focused on supporting community-level and state initiatives, as well as civic service projects, we could have had a memorable Independence Day this year that was something more than the annual parades and fireworks displays.  And I don't even want to contemplate what the semiquincentennial would have been like had Biden passed off his low-key observance plans to a President Kamala Harris, given that Harris' idea of fun is drinking chamomile tea in a velvet-upholstered chair.   To be honest, we don't know what sort of celebration Harris would have presided over.  But what's worse is that we do know what sort of celebration Trump is presiding over.

Perhaps a big celebration in 2026 with a world's fair and lots of fun was out of the question from the start.  Sure, we had problems in 1976 - decaying cities, stagflation, "Afternoon Delight" hitting number one - but we didn't have any problems we thought we couldn't handle.  But since July 4, 1976, we've had a half-century of downers - the Iran hostage crisis, the Moscow Olympics boycott, John Lennon becoming yet another New York City murder statistic, Reaganomics, MTV,  "Like a Virgin" cluttering the top of the Billboard charts for six weeks, AIDS, crack, right-wing talk radio, Clarence Thomas, Newt Gingrich, Kurt Cobain becoming yet another Washington State suicide statistic, the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Clinton impeachment, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war against the Islamic State, the war in Iran, a Target store opening in the historic Carson Pirie Scott department store building in downtown Chicago, the Tea Party, MAGA, COVID, Trump's first term as President . . . and for the past year in change we've had Trump's second term is President, and the second verse is worse than the first.  It seems that Trump has shoved a decade's worth of revolting developments into that short time frame.

In short, we've had fifty years of so many bad breaks that to celebrate this country and its history with a big party seems to have become a fool's errand . . . and some of the disregard for our history from both the left and the right warrants another post for later.

Anyway, the ultimate big party, a world's fair, was likely not going to happen this year even if Martin O'Malley were President now.  Because the last American world's fair in New Orleans in 1984 was underattended and a financial flop.  Perhaps the Great American State Fair, with its shanty pavilions and its big Ferris wheel, was Trump's attempt to produce a world's fair on the cheap.  Maybe he still has memories of the 1964-65 World's Fair that took place in his native Queens and "inspired" him.  But a real world's fair? In These States?  Not after so many world's fairs have been financial flops - that includes the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition - and not after Congress restricted government involvement in such events.  (We don't even have federally funded U.S. pavilions in foreign world's fairs, and the ones that get privately funded when corporate America feels like funding them are poorly executed.)  In addition, digital technology allowing exhibits of world's-fair-quality and the half-baked joke of a permanent world's fair that is EPCOT in Florida have rendered international exhibitions in the United States as obsolete as the Victrola.  

Why indeed have a big party in These States right now?

What's there to celebrate?

Free Dumb 250

It sounded good on paper.  The Trump regime planned to have a series of concerts to lead to the big quarter-millennial anniversary of American independence next month.  Except that the performers that Trump singed up were a bunch of undertalented, washed-up hasbeens from the early nineties.  And Martina McBride.

As it turned out, all of those performers (except for one Robert Van Winkle - Google the name to see who he is) slated for Freedom 250 have been backing out one by one, and McBride was the first one to withdraw, saying that she thought she was signing up for a concert to celebrate the country when in fact she came to realize - as did almost all of the other performers - that Freedom 250 was a celebration of Donald Trump.  The most recent dropout was Fabrice Morvan, one half of Milli Vanilli, the infamous Afro-German duo caught lip-syncing to someone else's voices.  (Robert Pilatus, the other performer in the group, died in 1997.)  Morvan, now a successful record producer in Germany, withdrew saying that a Trump celebration is not what he signed up for.

Dude, when you've lose Fabrice Morvan, you've lost the world.  (I could name all of the other performers who bailed out, but that's not important.)

Trump decided to cancel the whole damn thing, realizing that pretty soon, all he'd have left for the concerts were bands like Trippy the Hippie, the Freakouts, Chocolate Raspberry, Dummy Mummy, Mellow Monster Music, The Elders of Sandwich, and the Candy Cigarettes.  (I have just made those band names up.)  So, instead of Freedom 250, he's going to have - you guessed it! - a rally.

Of course.

Meanwhile, Trump has been making a big deal of how most people don't realize that there's a silent "b" at the end of "dumb."

Come on, Trump, even Dan Quayle knows that. 

Swum and Sunk

One of the most galling things about the outcome of the 2024 presidential election - a topic I will return to with much more vigor and vitriol tomorrow - is that, given that the United States about to co-host the World Cup with Canada and Mexico, celebrate a quarter millennium of nationhood, and host the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, we could have had Kamala Harris, a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent with a husband of Eastern European Jewish origin, presiding over all of this from the White House - a White House with an intact East Wing - and demonstrating that the United States had truly become an international nation.  Instead we put a xenophobic, provincial, undereducated real estate developer from Queens back in charge.  And Trump not only knows he has the World Cup, the semiquincentennial celebration, and the Olympics happening under his reign of error, he brags about it.

Instead of a Jamaican-American President, we got once again a President from Jamaica Estates.

Because he's in like Flynn - Michael Flynn - with FIFA, the World Cup games in These States will go on as planned, at least with the teams that don't lose any members to Immigration and Custom Enforcement custody.  The semiquincentennial, however, is likely to be a disaster, because I already see less promotion, interest, or hype around it than that which surrounded the bicentennial fifty years ago.  CBS - now being denigrated by the Ellison family and Bari Weiss - can't even be bothered to air "semiquincentennial minutes."  And then there is the unpleasant subject of the Olympics.

Back in early September, I wrote about how I sent a letter to newly installed International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry (above) urging her to have the 2028 Olympics moved out of Los Angeles and out of the U.S. entirely.  At first I wasn't going to write Chief LA28 Athletic Officer Janet Evans make my case for the same because I had no postal address . . . until I found one.  And thus I went ahead and wrote both swimming legends, addressing them in their current capacities,  and subsequently waited for replies.

It's been nearly four months, and I haven't heard from either of them.

I'm not going to write them again.  I've had enough trying to convince the powers that be - and my Olympic heartthrob - of the need to stop the Los Angeles Olympics from happening under MAGA.  Even if Kirsty Coventry wanted to move the Games to another country - say, her own, Zimbabwe - she's need the support of the full committee membership and is unlikely to get it.  And Janet Evans?  She's just the athletic officer, she's not involved in location-related logistics.  These two women must get so much correspondence as it is, my letters probably never reached them . . . and even if they did, they probably had no time to read them themselves.  Besides, Janet Evans has a son who's a high school senior now, and she's probably helping him choose a college to attend (University of Southern California, no doubt), with no time to read a letter from little ol' me. 

It is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't.  All we can do right now is hope Trump and his entire administration are removed from power (consult Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution for more on that) before July 2028 (and hopefully before July 2026!).  I'm not going to get my knickers in a knot over Kirsty Coventry's failure to acknowledge my letter.  As for Janet Evans, I could never, ever be upset with the dear woman. 😊 

I am, however, upset with her 1996 Olympics swimming teammate Amy Van Dyken, who recently said she went back to church because she was inspired by what a wonderful guy Charlie Kirk was in the wake of his assassination.   

I don't want to talk about it . . ..

Anyway, the 2028 Olympics might not go on as planned.  Given Chinese saber-rattling against Taiwan, Iranian saber-rattling against everyone (but especially Israel), and the war between Russia and Ukraine grinding on, and given Trump's cavalier attitude toward all of this, we're likely to have a third world war anyway.