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.
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?
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