I winced too. When I saw they were holding a UFC fight on the White House lawn to kick off America’s 250th birthday, something in me reached for the word tacky before I finished the thought. A cage match? For the Declaration of Independence?
Then I caught myself, because I know where that reflex comes from, and it isn’t love of the founding. A poll going around says only about one in six Americans thought the fight was an appropriate way to mark the moment, and the people sharing it think it proves how far we’ve fallen. They have it backward. The gaudy version of this birthday isn’t the cheap one. It’s the real one, and it always has been.
Recommended Stories
Give the worry its due. The fear is that turning everything into spectacle hollows it out, that a country which can only celebrate itself through cage fights and fireworks has forgotten how to mean anything. That isn’t snobbery. If I thought the noise was a substitute for substance, I’d be making the same point. But it rests on a memory that never happened. It imagines a dignified American past we’ve fallen away from, and that past is a fiction.
Take the celebration everyone now treats as sacred. The 1876 centennial in Philadelphia wasn’t a solemn rite. It was a sprawling, commercial, faintly ridiculous world’s fair that nodded at the Revolution just long enough to spin around and show off the machinery. Ten million people paid their fifty cents to stand slack-jawed before a giant steam engine and a strange new gadget called the telephone. The hundredth birthday that the tasteful crowd thinks we’re betraying was a carnival with a turnstile.
The bicentennial was no better. Disney ran a parade twice a day for more than a year, and Paul Anka hosted a primetime special called “Happy Birthday, America.” It was pure pop kitsch, and the people who were there remember it as one of the warmest moments of shared feeling we ever had. The living founders didn’t mark the 50th anniversary with anything close to 1876 — the day is remembered now mostly because Adams and Jefferson both died on it. The hushed, candlelit template everybody’s defending was never handed down to us. We made it up and got precious about it.
So the loud, mortifying party isn’t a fall from tradition – it is the tradition. The people insisting otherwise are the heirs of whoever stood before that steam engine in 1876 and sniffed that it was no way to honor the founders. The engine was the point.
I grew up in Vidalia, Georgia, a town of 10,000 that throws a festival every April for an onion, with beauty queens on flatbed trailers and an air show headlined by the Blue Angels. Nobody treats it as ironic, and nobody apologizes for it. That is the America that raised me, where a county fair and a flag on the porch were never a statement, but the furniture of a life. I left and ended up in rooms where America gets called tacky, and I’ve sat quietly in plenty of them. The sneer is rarely about taste. Tacky is the word people reach for when something is enjoyed by the wrong crowd in the wrong way. Patriotism starts looking embarrassing the moment it stops belonging to the people who consider themselves its rightful stewards, and good taste becomes the velvet rope they use to keep the founding to themselves.
FBI ARRESTS TWO MORE MEN IN FOILED WHITE HOUSE UFC DRONE ATTACK
A dignified ceremony reaches only the people who already planned to come. The carnival reaches everybody else. Not every choice this year will age well. Some of it will look silly in the photos, the way the bunting and the Anka special look silly now, which is to say charming, which is to say like us. But the charge that the brashness itself cheapens the thing is the one claim the history won’t support.
The country turning 250 isn’t too good for a gaudy party. The gaudy party is one of the more democratic things it does.
Andrew Logan Lawrence is a writer from Georgia and a former senior correspondent for Campus Reform. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Hill, and the Times of Israel.
