I’m a countercultural Gen X-er, so flag waving has never been my thing. A major benefit of living in France has been a long respite from performative patriotism. No one here gives a shit about the 4th of July, so my tradition is usually just calling my mother at some point the day after to hear whether her friends nailed the cedar plank salmon and clam dip.
Last year is a perfect example: I was cleaning out the guest room to make way for the daughter of some old friends in New York. She was on her final summer break before starting college, passing through from Berlin, and needed a few days to sleep it off before joining friends in Paris. When she arrived, we dropped in on my neighbor Gérard, who has a stud farm on a ton of land. He and his husband were lounging by the pool in speedos, but when we asked to see the horses, Gérard threw on a wifebeater that said “Trouble” across the front, fired up his quad, and took us on a percheron safari.
As we bumped and jerked across the fields at high speed, Gérard aimed squarely at the massive shrubs of wild mint dotting the field like a teenager on a dare. It was easier than mowing them down, he explained, as herby perfume and dust enveloped the air. We stopped only to check in on one of his newest foals, and so that Gérard could go briefly bushwacking, in espadrilles, in search of a stray Belted Galloway calf that had gone missing. Even if back in America, shit was already falling apart, over here it was resolutely local, happily rooted, and no trouble at all.
This summer is different. Since mid-June, starting with Trump’s Idiocracy-style birthday celebration on the White House lawn, the buildup to the 250th has been too shambolic to avoid. But because I’m not surrounded by other Americans trying to tune it out and get on with their lives, I have experienced it all through American media, which makes everything so much worse.
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The knot in my stomach has compounded with each subsequent story. There’s Trump using his Freedom 250 committee for partisan influence-peddling grift. Did you catch the government-sanctioned, on-site baptismal font at the blissfully deserted Great American State Fair? Did Trump’s weird Cold War-flavored harangue in front of Mount Rushmore the night before last creep you out as much as it did me? The only comfort I take is knowing that it is physically impossible to add his face to the existing lineup of American presidents on that overdetermined cliff in South Dakota. Even if Ana Paulina Luna’s proposed legislation to add him had passed, there wouldn’t be enough stone mass to accommodate his flapping jowls and butthole mouth. Celebrate the small wins.
French media has been solemnly observing the important milestone, holding down some dignity on our behalf, with educational documentaries on American history, going deep on the Statue of Liberty, key battles around 1776, when the French tilted the balance in our favor, and the untold story of Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet.
The disaster is breaking through here too though. Michel told me this morning he was obsessed with “all of it: the reflecting pool, the plastic arch, the lack of crowds, the pathetic stands. I love it all. I looooooovvve it.”
Normally I would too, but too much is at stake. It’s not just the dead seriousness of the authoritarianism on display, nor the wanton destruction of the monuments that once seemed so untouchable. (Or did until January 6, at least.) It’s not even the 400-odd members of the neo-Nazi Patriot Front who showed up yesterday with Confederate flags and crisp Banana Republic khakis, but not enough cojones to take off their masks and show their faces.
Those things are all four-alarm fires, but I find myself almost as bothered at just how fucking shabby it is. Trump’s bread and circuses are stale and threadbare, dismantling our soft power as much as his tariffs, European troop drawdown and clusterfuck war in Iran are hacking away at our political hegemony. The neocon military theorist Edward Luttwak argues that we’ve been “post-heroic” ever since declining birth rates deprived the armed forces of the spare sons needed for any country to be cavalier about hot wars. That may be true, but scoundrel wasn’t the whole brand until Trump.
At least there was a tempest that briefly threatened to derail what POTUS’s hubris, cronyism and bad taste managed to leave still standing. I have never rooted for disaster before, but I did early this morning, checking Twitter on my daily 4am cortisol wakeup and promptly joining Team Deluge.
You used to be able to count on America to dazzle its moral turpitude away with the most epic showmanship. Our propaganda worked because the writers were pros and the production values were top tier. The bloodthirsty Comanches in The Searchers were so much more menacing in Vistavision. The gold braid on the uniforms of all the dissolute, perverted Yankees in Gone With the Wind popped so much more when shot with a three-strip camera that synchronized multiple magazines. Ronald Reagan couldn’t have reversed our progress toward a more perfect union anywhere near as efficiently if he hadn’t been a Hollywood actor. But now we’ve jumped the shark. The stage is collapsing. Nobody’s buying what we’re selling.
“There’s a lot about America that could be celebrated, but I can’t get past how awful everything is,” my brother wrote me yesterday from Flatbush, Brooklyn. Another Brooklynite, this one a brother from another mother who came to the States as a kid from Haiti, was feeling especially remorseful this year because of SCOTUS’s decision to end protected status for refugees from his native country. The gavel on that case came down two weeks ago, but he had been on pins and needles for weeks awaiting the decision. He’s been drowning his sorrows in the World Cup, whose celebrations up and down North America have shown us to be more welcoming and generous than our leaders. “The American people are often better than their politics,” he said. Maybe I would be more in touch with that truth if I were in the company of more Americans more often.
Like a lot of people my age looking for a mental happy place, I can’t stop flashing back to the Bicentennial, when I was seven years old, in pigtails and Toughskins, and headed to the altar with Andy Gibb. Even if our collective slide into tribal partisanship had already started with Watergate and Vietnam, we still managed to have a good time together. Over 1,000 crafts pulled up to New York Harbor in one of the largest ever peacetime naval get-togethers. There was a wagon train pilgrimage to Valley Forge with almost a million visitors. Stars and stripes covered everything that moved, and the kids were boogeying down to “Philadelphia Freedom,” Elton John’s 1975 hit that became the song of that summer too.
What I didn’t know until yesterday was that the song was written for Billie Jean King. They had met at a party in 1973, two weeks before she was to grind Bobby Riggs’ flat ass into the ground at the glorious Battle of the Sexes. King was the number one ranked female player in the world then, a five-time Wimbledon champ, and the number one draft pick of the Philadelphia Freedoms, during the sadly short-lived era of World Team Tennis. John was a global superstar.
Little wonder that two of the most famous closeted people in the world hit it off immediately. Life in the spotlight must have been suffocating for them both. A foaming-at-the-mouth tennis fan, with King’s friendship, Elton felt his muse quiver. Even though Bernie Taupin arguably wasn’t at his best on the lyrics, the rest is disco history. I love it, yes I do.
I wonder if we’ll ever get back to being exuberant together when it’s not around a soccer pitch or reaching back for analog times. One of my former editors suggested that I could always just wish Geraldo Rivera a happy birthday and leave it at that.
I guess we’ll always have Al Capone’s vault.
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