America 250 can revive national unity despite divisions

Mary McNamara, Tribune News Service

"America 250” is no “Spirit of ‘76.” For those of us who remember the bicentennial, the semiquincentennial is a complete and utter dud. Many fine festivities will take place on and around July 4, but compared with the years-long nationwide celebration that marked this country’s 200th anniversary, 250 feels like a non-event. Perhaps it was inevitable. Semiquincentennial (meaning half of a 500-year anniversary) certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as bicentennial and our current president isn’t making it any catchier. Mostly because he seems to think 250 is the new 80 (the birthday President Donald Trump recently marked with his UFC Freedom 250 cage match on the White House lawn).

As many have noted, Trump’s method of honoring this country’s birthday involves making it all about him by demolishing parts of the White House (to install a new bunker-like ballroom), attempting to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for pardoned Jan. 6 rioters, seeking to build a triumphal arch that a majority of Americans oppose and trying to slap his name and/or image on any surface he can think of (including a proposed $250 bill ). No wonder so many artists have dropped out of the concert series planned for the Great American State Fair in Washington, DC.

To be fair, the federal government’s involvement in bicentennial planning also got bogged down with political and personal hubris. The national commission, originally created by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was reformed under President Richard Nixon. Plagued by criticism and scandal, it was eventually dissolved by Congress and replaced by a new commission that decided to mostly fund community celebrations.

There was much hand-wringing over missed opportunities at the time, but for more than a year, state and local governments staged reenactments, parades and patriotic events all over the country while the commercial sector star-spangled the crap out of everything: T-shirts, bell-bottoms and bathing suits; curtains, bedspreads and throw rugs; dishware, glassware and Tupperware.

The Declaration of Independence appeared on highball glasses, tea towels and collectible plates. Beginning in 1974, CBS ran mini-history lessons called“Bicentennial Minutes,” which were then sent up on shows as diverse as “Hee Haw” and “Maude.” George Washington and other Founding Fathers graced Pez dispensers, coasters and the cover of Mad Magazine. There was a bicentennial Barbie and a colonial Campbell’s Soup doll. McDonald’s sold red, white and blue milkshakes, Burger King offered a flag-bedecked series of glass tumblers, Disney characters wore tricorn hats for a line of park merchandise.

Some called it the “buy-centennial” but for a kid who daily rocked Stars and Stripes sneakers, and, thanks to a year’s worth of American-history-themed “Schoolhouse Rock!,” could, and would, sing the preamble to the Constitution or the anthem“No More Kings” at the drop of a hat, it was great fun. Now, of course, “No More Kings” is an anti-Trump protest theme, and the right has so co-opted patriotism that wearing a flag-emblazoned T-shirt can feel somehow partisan. American history itself has become a bone of contention, with the left accusing the right of whitewashing this country’s inarguable sins — Native American displacement, slavery, gender inequality and racist policies — while the right insists that the left is obsessed with undermining our nation’s power and legacy by “woke”-shaming it.

The only thing each end of our divided political spectrum can agree on is that democracy is under mortal threat from the other. That’s one good reason to feel less than festive, and there are plenty of others, including increased political violence, the war in Iran, tariffs, surging gas prices, civil rights rollbacks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics, artificial intelligence’s threat to jobs, the resurgence of measles, the rising cost of just about everything and the fact that some critics are claiming that Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is less full of wonder than “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

But things weren’t so great heading into the bicentennial either. I was 12 at the time, born nine months after Alabama Gov. George Wallace gave his infamous “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech and less than two months before President Kennedy was assassinated. I hadn’t been alive a year when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan and hadn’t turned 5 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were also assassinated.

Sure, it was that now-wistfully remembered time when kids went out in the morning and played, mostly unmonitored, until nightfall (with the inevitable trips to the doctor for stitches and tetanus shots for those wounds too obvious to hide from parents). But by the time the bicentennial rolled around, my life had played out against the backdrop of civil unrest and the Vietnam War, both spilling from our black-and-white television almost nightly.