The Bicensesquiwhat?

Did you know that the United States is celebrating its 250th year of independence this year?

Admittedly this idea has a number of qualifiers attached to it.

It depends on how you define “250th,” for one thing. Americans have always backdated the end of British colonial rule here to July 4, 1776, which is the date that Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress then meeting in Philadelphia, with some editorial changes that Jefferson wasn’t happy about. As the junior member of the Virginia delegation there wasn’t much he could do about it, though. John Adams thought the date we would celebrate would be July 2, which is when the Continental Congress voted to approve the resolution declaring independence in the first place, but so it goes. Both of those dates rest on the idea that the colonies suddenly became independent simply by declaring themselves to be so – something that the veterans of the Revolutionary War might have had some opinions to the contrary about. It took six years of hard fighting (starting more than a year before the Declaration of Independence was approved) and then another two years of negotiations to produce the formal treaty granting the colonies independence from Britain, but nobody really worries about 1783. We count our independence from July 4, 1776, and that’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

It also depends on how you define “independence,” which seems to be an issue these days as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump takes his marching orders from a parade of failed human beings across the globe, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu but also including Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. Hard to pretend you’re independent under those circumstances.

And it depends on how you define “celebrating.”

I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, back in 1976. No, we didn’t wait until 1983 to celebrate 200 years of American independence. This was the 1970s, a decade that included a deeply corrupt president neck deep in criminal activities and illegal conspiracies to hold onto power, a wildly unpopular war that the US lost, an oil crisis, and a stagnating economy, so it was very different from today. Sort of different. Vaguely different? Yeah, kind of the same, actually. Sorry. Anyway, we needed something to take our mind off all that and the Bicentennial was it.

If you weren’t there, you can’t even begin to imagine how hyped Bicentennial was.

Every product on the market came in Bicentennial packaging, for example. Beer. Paper towels. Toys. Phones. Lawn décor. Plates. Clothing. Hats. Pencils. Food of all kinds – I have distinct memories of buying Spanish olives that had a Revolutionary War scene printed right on the jar. On and on. Packaging companies ran out of red, white, and blue ink. It was hard to tell brands apart because for nearly two years they all had interchangeable Bicentennial labels. I’m sure in the confusion a lot of money was spent on things people didn’t actually intend to buy, but at least we got to try new stuff that way.

Speaking of money, they even changed the coins for the Bicentennial. We got new quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins, and if nobody ever used the last two that was just how it went. I still find Bicentennial quarters in change even now. They made billions of them. They’re worth exactly twenty-five cents these days, but they’re kind of cool. Also, our local chamber of commerce minted giant aluminum coins that you could buy for 76 cents and then participating merchants would redeem them for a dollar. They called them Continentals, which was kind of ironic if you know the history of Continental currency, but it was a good deal and we appreciated it. I still have a couple of them.

The railroad underpass near my house got an entire Bicentennial mural painted on it and my brother and I would beg to go that way to get to my grandparents’ house – all of three miles away – but it wasn’t on our usual route there so that didn’t happen very often. It was exciting when it did. They finally painted it over sometime in the 80s after most of it had mildewed off the walls.

Tourism flourished to the point where the mayor of Philadelphia – the same deep thinker who once said that the streets of Philadelphia were safe, it was only the people who made them unsafe – openly talked about calling out the National Guard for crowd control, which drastically lowered the number of people who wanted to come to Philadelphia and thus, in a roundabout sort of way, solved the problem.

There were Bicentennial movies, Bicentennial television shows, Bicentennial games, Bicentennial advertisements, Bicentennial sporting events, and Bicentennial cultural events – my personal favorite as a 10-year-old boy being the parade of tall ships that they sailed up the Delaware River that summer. There were Bicentennial parades, picnics, and celebrations. I remember going with my family over to my grandparents’ house on the actual day and hanging out with them and their neighbors who had set up a ping pong table in their driveway. We spent a glorious afternoon whacking a ping pong ball over the roof of the garage and into their back yard and felt suitably patriotic while doing so. It’s what the Founding Fathers would have wanted.

It’s hard, in other words to overstate just how saturated the United States was with Bicentennial everything, and for how long. It started small, sometime in 1974 or so, a cheerful distraction from the sleaze of the Watergate Scandal, gathered steam through 1975, and then was full-blown Everywhere All The Time for most of 1976 until it faded away by the fall in time for the elections. You couldn’t escape it if you tried.

For all the problems facing the US at the time – and there were so, so many – Americans still felt that the republic was worth celebrating. That there was something there underneath all of the grime and if we dug in and tried we could find it and get back on track. We disagreed vehemently what “on track” might look like, but even in the middle of all the crises of the 1970s there was broad agreement that there was still something worth celebrating, whatever it was.

I’m not getting that vibe here in 2026. Really, I’m not.

For one thing, there is almost no hype. I’ve seen some product packaging but only the barest percentage of what I saw in the mid-1970s – a few soda cans, a hat or two, and some paper plates with the “America 250” logo on them surrounded by a flag design that was, objectively, upside down. This might have been an accident or it might have been some clever messaging because an upside-down flag signals distress and that’s where we are right now. In theory we have some new coins to mark the occasion just like we did in 1976, but since nobody uses cash anymore they’re actually kind of hard to find and almost nobody I ask about them – including my bank – knows they exist.

And for another thing, there is very little celebration and even less reason for people to want to change that. We have a blisteringly incompetent, openly kleptocratic government run by a staggeringly corrupt senile convicted felon who has been credibly accused of raping children and is turning the entire federal government into a cover-up machine to protect him from punishment for that crime, among others. He is surrounded by neo-Nazi ghouls working to ethnically cleanse a nation of immigrants while systematically reducing the republic to dictatorship and destroying a century of progress made by better Americans. He’s led us into the worst military defeat in this nation’s history, one whose repercussions haven’t even begun to sink in yet. His minions executed American citizens in the streets for daring to object to his kidnapping and trafficking children to foreign countries, and none of those minions have been punished. He’s gutted American science and research. And if you think the midterm elections will be allowed to happen freely and fairly you’re not paying attention.

Nobody wants to celebrate this, not even the people responsible for this degradation. The only official events that I’ve seen planned are a homoerotic wrestling match to be held on the White House lawn – ironic, given this administration’s outright and perhaps just a little too stridently bellowed opposition to anything that isn’t performatively heterosexual, though apparently large groups of gay men are planning to buy tickets and show up for the event shirtless and fully glittered out just to make the point – and a concert that has now completely fallen apart because county-fair-level has-beens like Milli Vanilli declared it was beneath their dignity to participate. Not that they are wrong about that.

As one internet comment I read so eloquently put it, celebrating the American republic right now feels kind of like attending an Irish wake – nice party and all, but the guest of honor is dead.

I don’t know when things will change or whether I will still be around to see it – several people have recently told me I need to watch what I say here or even delete my internet presence entirely, given my loudly expressed contempt for the current regime and its lickspittle toadies. But it’s my country and they can’t have it, and there will come a time when everyone will have always been against all of this.

And when that time comes, perhaps then we’ll celebrate.