Can’t take credit for this. It’s a hand-me-down, but it’s real and true, and we all know it.
250 years. Two hundred and fifty years of the most powerful, most resourced, most theoretically capable nation in the history of human civilization and here is what we have to show for it.
Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.
Two hundred and fifty years of that. And to celebrate, we built a wrestling arena on the White House lawn.
Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single thing that addresses a single item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and in some cases died trying.
Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.
We built a culture where a football coach makes forty times what a physics professor makes, and then express genuine bewilderment at the outcomes. Where a reality television star becomes president and a school district cuts its art program in the same fiscal year. Where children know every statistic of every player on their favorite sports team, and cannot locate their own country on a map. Where scientific consensus on vaccines, climate, evolution, and basic nutrition gets weighed against a Facebook post, and the Facebook post wins at the dinner table. Where the school that wins the state championship gets a parade, and the school that produces a Nobel laureate gets a budget cut.
We chose the bomber over the teacher. The tank over the clinic. The aircraft carrier over the water treatment plant. We spend more on the military than the next ten countries combined, including our allies, while veterans sleep on the streets of the cities they came back to. We built the most expensive killing apparatus in human history and then told the nurse she made too much money. We sent young men to die in wars that made defense contractors rich and called it freedom and put a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of the car and called that support. We made the soldier and the police officer into sacred, untouchable symbols of national identity and then cut their benefits, denied their PTSD claims, let them die waiting for VA appointments, and sent them back for third and fourth tours because it was cheaper than taking care of them when they came home. We worshipped the uniform and neglected the human inside it because the uniform is a symbol, and symbols are cheaper than healthcare, housing and the therapy that would actually help. We built bases in 150 countries and could not build enough affordable housing in 50 states. We funded a military budget that could have ended homelessness, medical debt and student debt several times over, and we did it with bipartisan enthusiasm and called the people who questioned it unserious.
We chose entertainment over education so many times and for so long and at every available level of society that we forgot there was a distinction worth making. Spectacle over substance, performance over policy, the aesthetics of greatness in place of the actual thing, and the feeling of winning instead of asking what was being won and who was paying for it and what it would cost the people who came next.
Rome had bread and circuses. We Americans have food stamps and a wrestling ring outside the Oval Office.
250 years. This is what we built. This is what we chose. This is what we are celebrating. And the most perfectly, catastrophically, irreducibly American thing about all of it is that anyone pointing at this image and asking what it means will be called unpatriotic by people watching it on a television they bought on credit they cannot afford to pay back, rooting for a sport they cannot explain, in a country they cannot describe, celebrating a birthday they cannot contextualize, for a nation that has spent two and a half centuries confusing the noise it makes with the work it never did, all while claiming to be the greatest country on Earth.
Happy Birthday, America! You have never looked more like yourself!
