The odometer on the minivan reached 200,000 miles this weekend, a milestone that we missed completely because we were actively driving at the time. I remember looking down and thinking, “Only a dozen miles to go!” and then a couple minutes went by and I looked down and thought, “Huh, now we’re six miles over,” and that was that. But now all of our vehicles have passed that milestone. We are the Car Whisperers. Or, more accurately, the guys over at the auto mechanic place are. But we’ll take it.
We hit this Big Round Number on the way home from spending the weekend in northern Wisconsin, up by Kim’s old stomping grounds. It’s pretty country if you enjoy rural areas, small towns, and wide-open spaces, though more often than not we’re heading up that way for somebody’s memorial service which does put a damper on things. But you go, because you pay your respects. And it’s good to go back to one’s roots.
There were actually two memorials, it turns out – one for Veronica and one for Lena, who died about four months apart. It was a rough year up there.
We drove up on Friday and found the little rental apartment with no problems. It was the right-hand side of a small house owned by an older Mennonite couple who were quite lovely to talk with. Despite being fairly new construction the place was clearly designed with 1986 in mind. The “late-Reagan floral with patterned couches” style – complete with an actual oak-stained computer desk with a hutch overhead and a pull-out keyboard holder underneath – is instantly recognizable to those of us who lived through it. But it was a great place to spend a night, clean and comfortable and very quiet, out there on the farm. We watched a storm roll in that night across the fields. We’d stay there again.
Kim’s parents and her brother Randall drove up for the memorial as well and we met them at the diner in Ladysmith before heading to the lobby of their hotel for further hanging out. It’s good to spend time with good people. Afterward Kim and I walked around the public park in the middle of Ladysmith, a place full of memories for her. You get to know people a bit if you spend time in their places.
The next day we headed over to Jump River for the memorial.
Jump River is an unincorporated town with two bars, a church, a store, and a dozen or so houses strung along the highway. At one point before everything got started Kim and I walked around the entire town, which took about fifteen minutes even if you include the random dog that tried to bite me (three cheers for sturdy pants, I say). Kim spent a good portion of her younger days in Jump River Rose’s bar, in fact, because in northern Wisconsin bars function as community centers as well as saloons and it had live music and dancing every weekend. Jump River Rose herself was a fixture when Kim was growing up and was apparently quite a character, as fixtures in small towns should be. According to reminiscences of some of the people at the memorial as well as several newspaper stories I just looked up, she could hold a 16lb maul at arm’s length for five minutes straight, smoked cigars as big as she was, swore like a stevedore and once threw a drunk through the front door. (“Sometimes you ain’t got time to open them,” she said.) She’s long gone now but the bar is still there. Every town needs its landmarks.
I grew up far away from Jump River, out on the east coast, and by “east coast” I do not mean Sheboygan the way people in Wisconsin do when they say “east coast.” Memorials were rather more formal where I grew up then they are in Wisconsin, and I was duly warned about this, perhaps to prevent me from defaulting to some combination of three-piece suit and cape, neither of which I own but wouldn’t it be something if I did? So I was expecting something more low-key than I had experienced in the memorial services of my youth though it did take me a second to adjust to the picnic format. It has to be said that it was a very good time, though, all things considered. There were a lot of people to whom I was introduced as “And this is Kim’s husband, Dave,” and there were some lovely stories told about Veronica (whom I’d met once or twice) and Lena (whom I don’t think I’d ever met at all), and there was quite a tasty lunch afterward – the “funeral lunch” in Wisconsin being one of the nicer traditions I’ve run into since moving here.
We said our goodbyes and headed off to visit our friends Joe and Lisa, who had just moved into a new house where the backyard is full of deer and golfers. They’re both recovering from surgeries on top of trying to move, which is how I ended up spending a chunk of that evening putting together an entertainment center with an Allen wrench, because this entertainment center was made of depleted uranium and grief and there was no way two people recovering from various surgeries were going to moose that thing into existence. It looks nice and I am hopeful that my construction skills do not lead to it suddenly implode at a random time to be named later.
All four of us are fairly low-stress people and we had a relaxing time of it, Allen wrenches notwithstanding. There was much hanging out. We watched the Phillies beat the Brewers in a game where the final score looked like they were playing football. There were Aperol spritzes and at least one Dairy Queen run, which you can do in town. We had a good time.
It was an uneventful drive back down to Our Little Town Sunday afternoon, and we arrived to one very grateful cat, one deeply annoyed rabbit, and our own bed.
Monday, June 15, 2026
Monday, June 8, 2026
News and Updates
1. So apparently we’ve hit the point in the year where these quick hit posts are the best I can manage, or perhaps we’ve hit that point again. They do tend to crop up more and more, I find. The odd thing is that I’m not objectively all that busy – the semester is over, I’m not teaching any summer classes, my Perpetual Online Class got handed off to some other sucker instructor back in December, and I’m only getting paid to be an advisor two days per week. And yet here we are.
2. It’s not like we don’t have other things to do, though. Friday Kim and I went to a Social Gathering of friends, which was enjoyable. We are all people who enjoy the idea of drinking alcohol more than the actual practice of drinking alcohol so it does tend to build up in our homes and every so often we have a Cocktail Lab Party where the main goal is to get rid of some of the back stock, except (vide supra, re: idea vs practice) it tends not to work very well as far as the main goal is concerned, though we have an enjoyable time anyway.
3. And last night we were at a retirement party for one of our colleagues down at Home Campus, which was both a lot of fun, since there were many good people to talk with, and a bit sad at the same time, since this colleague will be sorely missed. But that is the nature of jobs, and so we enjoy having people around while we can.
4. This lesson got reinforced today when we went to a memorial service for a former colleague from Home Campus, one who had retired back in 1999. It was a long service but it went well and there were a number of old colleagues I hadn’t seen in a while. I genuinely do not like going to these sorts of things, but I’m always glad I went. You pay your respects.
5. I’m slowly making headway on designing my new class for next spring. I taught a version of it a decade ago for a different university and I’m trying to incorporate parts of that, and it will also overlap with the last third or so of my Western Civ II class, so I’m trying to incorporate parts of that as well, and the goal is to do this without it coming out as a Frankenstein’s Monster of mismatched bits and bobs. We’ll get there.
6. Yes, I’ve been paying attention to the news. Let me see if I’ve got some of the recent low points: We’re merging our military with the IDF and likely turning over control of it to the Israeli government, because that’s a surefire long-term winner of a strategy. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump got called out over his election lies by a reporter (a woman, which he can’t handle in the best of times), got pissy with her, and then lurched off camera in a toddler-level snit which he has tried to sell as strength but which anyone with more than six working brain cells knows is just what happens when a weak and cowardly bullshit artist gets cornered by something he can’t handwave away. California is taking its time counting all the ballots in its recent primaries by hand to avoid having the results tampered with by Elon Musk and the American right is melting down over the entire idea of having a free and fair election that they might not win – keep this in mind for November, by the way. Two economists published a thoroughly researched paper that predicts AI will – not might, will – destroy the global economy unless strong countermeasures are taken immediately. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s henchmen recently began removing scientific apparatus from the Atlantic Ocean because it measures how badly the AMOC is deteriorating, which directly contradicts their hallucinatory fantasies about there not being any climate crisis – this despite Congress twice prohibiting any such removals. The DOJ argued in court that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump could have the Statue of Liberty bulldozed tomorrow and there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do about it, because this is somehow different from an unrestricted dictatorship. The World Cup is collapsing in real time due to the vicious and nonsensical Nativist restrictions on players, fans, and officials entering the US. There was a fourth presidential assassination attempt (so-called) that already nobody remembers or cares about. The CEO of Exxon is predicting that US oil stockpiles will fall below viability in July, causing fuel and food prices to skyrocket. Couple this with the approaching Super El Niño and we could see mass hunger and social disruption around the world, since the last time we got one of those back in the late 1800s millions of people starved to death. That’s just what I can remember off the top of my head without bothering to look anything up. Are we great yet?
7. We fired up the pizza oven last night and had our first homemade pizzas of the season, because life is short and there are enough people out there trying to make everything worse so you might as well try to enjoy things while you can. It was good pizza.
8. We’re heading into our first heat wave of the season, and this is why I don’t like summer. People think summers are good but that’s only because they remember the break between school years when they had months of unstructured time and no real responsibilities. Summer itself is hot, sticky, uncomfortable, and overlong. It’s June 8 – only five more months until civilized weather!
9. Today also marks eight years since Anthony Bourdain died. I never met the man but even so I miss him. He was an interested and interesting person who understood that people are people and the best way to get to know them was through food. The world is a poorer place with him gone.
2. It’s not like we don’t have other things to do, though. Friday Kim and I went to a Social Gathering of friends, which was enjoyable. We are all people who enjoy the idea of drinking alcohol more than the actual practice of drinking alcohol so it does tend to build up in our homes and every so often we have a Cocktail Lab Party where the main goal is to get rid of some of the back stock, except (vide supra, re: idea vs practice) it tends not to work very well as far as the main goal is concerned, though we have an enjoyable time anyway.
3. And last night we were at a retirement party for one of our colleagues down at Home Campus, which was both a lot of fun, since there were many good people to talk with, and a bit sad at the same time, since this colleague will be sorely missed. But that is the nature of jobs, and so we enjoy having people around while we can.
4. This lesson got reinforced today when we went to a memorial service for a former colleague from Home Campus, one who had retired back in 1999. It was a long service but it went well and there were a number of old colleagues I hadn’t seen in a while. I genuinely do not like going to these sorts of things, but I’m always glad I went. You pay your respects.
5. I’m slowly making headway on designing my new class for next spring. I taught a version of it a decade ago for a different university and I’m trying to incorporate parts of that, and it will also overlap with the last third or so of my Western Civ II class, so I’m trying to incorporate parts of that as well, and the goal is to do this without it coming out as a Frankenstein’s Monster of mismatched bits and bobs. We’ll get there.
6. Yes, I’ve been paying attention to the news. Let me see if I’ve got some of the recent low points: We’re merging our military with the IDF and likely turning over control of it to the Israeli government, because that’s a surefire long-term winner of a strategy. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump got called out over his election lies by a reporter (a woman, which he can’t handle in the best of times), got pissy with her, and then lurched off camera in a toddler-level snit which he has tried to sell as strength but which anyone with more than six working brain cells knows is just what happens when a weak and cowardly bullshit artist gets cornered by something he can’t handwave away. California is taking its time counting all the ballots in its recent primaries by hand to avoid having the results tampered with by Elon Musk and the American right is melting down over the entire idea of having a free and fair election that they might not win – keep this in mind for November, by the way. Two economists published a thoroughly researched paper that predicts AI will – not might, will – destroy the global economy unless strong countermeasures are taken immediately. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s henchmen recently began removing scientific apparatus from the Atlantic Ocean because it measures how badly the AMOC is deteriorating, which directly contradicts their hallucinatory fantasies about there not being any climate crisis – this despite Congress twice prohibiting any such removals. The DOJ argued in court that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump could have the Statue of Liberty bulldozed tomorrow and there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do about it, because this is somehow different from an unrestricted dictatorship. The World Cup is collapsing in real time due to the vicious and nonsensical Nativist restrictions on players, fans, and officials entering the US. There was a fourth presidential assassination attempt (so-called) that already nobody remembers or cares about. The CEO of Exxon is predicting that US oil stockpiles will fall below viability in July, causing fuel and food prices to skyrocket. Couple this with the approaching Super El Niño and we could see mass hunger and social disruption around the world, since the last time we got one of those back in the late 1800s millions of people starved to death. That’s just what I can remember off the top of my head without bothering to look anything up. Are we great yet?
7. We fired up the pizza oven last night and had our first homemade pizzas of the season, because life is short and there are enough people out there trying to make everything worse so you might as well try to enjoy things while you can. It was good pizza.
8. We’re heading into our first heat wave of the season, and this is why I don’t like summer. People think summers are good but that’s only because they remember the break between school years when they had months of unstructured time and no real responsibilities. Summer itself is hot, sticky, uncomfortable, and overlong. It’s June 8 – only five more months until civilized weather!
9. Today also marks eight years since Anthony Bourdain died. I never met the man but even so I miss him. He was an interested and interesting person who understood that people are people and the best way to get to know them was through food. The world is a poorer place with him gone.
10. We are finally making progress on replacing the Door To Nowhere, which sits at the end of the upstairs hallway and provides instant access to the driveway though the first step is a long one. The wooden storm door is hanging on through sheer inertia and the interior door is mostly single-pane unsealed glass. We’ve been threatening to replace these doors since before the pandemic. Last fall our friend Adam – an actual carpenter – came by and measured everything that needed to be measured. And this weekend I went over to the Mega Hardware Store and told the door guy what Adam told me. And then the door guy asked me about a hundred questions, none of which I knew the answer to, so it took a couple of hours to get everything straightened out (who knew doors had so many options?) and then I sent everything to Adam and he said, “Yep, that’s the right size.” So sometime in July we will have doors, and then sometime after that we will get them installed. Honestly, if we get this resolved before the snow flies I’ll be good.
Tuesday, June 2, 2026
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 the 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.
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 the 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.