While provincial state governments stubbornly cling to outmoded historical narratives for the impending Semiquincentennial, the president's effort to wholly monopolize the anniversary offers a brilliantly vacant reimagining of national memory. We must surrender our adherence to linear time and let him reauthor the event entirely.
The current hand-wringing over President Donald Trump’s stated desire to personally own the festivities surrounding the 250th anniversary of the United States is as predictable as it is aesthetically cowardly; the states, bless their pedestrian little hearts, are reportedly leaning into complex history and regional storytelling, entirely missing the semiotic potential of simply erasing the past in favor of a monolithic, gold-plated present. To insist on acknowledging the messy, localized realities of 1776 is to engage in a sort of desperate, bourgeois nostalgia, whereas the president’s ambition to flatten two and a half centuries of democratic struggle into an exclusive, executive-branded pageant represents a thrilling, if perhaps accidental, plunge into the hyperreal. One must recognize that history itself is merely a draft awaiting a more confident editor; to deny Trump the copyright to the passage of time is to deny the very nature of modern American mythmaking.
The structural parallels are, to any serious observer of the culture, embarrassingly obvious, echoing the precise mechanism by which Walter Benjamin, in his canonical essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, warned of the past being violently blasted out of the continuum of time; though, of course, one could just as easily find this dynamic mirrored in the punishing, durational silence of Bela Tarr’s 1994 cinematic void Satantango, or, perhaps most vividly, in the spiraling, context-free caloric maximalism of the Cheesecake Factory menu. Just as the aforementioned menu divorces the concept of the egg roll from any earthly geography to present a pure, unadulterated simulacrum of consumption, the president is expertly divorcing the concept of America from its own agonizing timeline. The states, red and blue alike, are scrambling to organize meaningful local commemorations, acting like tedious archivists desperately clutching their primary sources while the sky itself is being painted in the triumphant, contextless hues of a real estate marketing brochure.
We are going to have the biggest, most beautiful passage of time you have ever seen, much better than the states, which frankly do not know how to be 250 years old.
It is a profound misunderstanding of the American project to assume that a national birthday requires reflection, when what it clearly demands is a totalizing aesthetic override; the states plotting their own independent, nuanced celebrations in defiance of Washington are merely delaying the inevitable realization that we no longer live in a historical continuum, but rather in a curated content ecosystem. We should not merely allow the president to own the 250th birthday; we should, if we have any lingering respect for the dramatic arc of civilization, gratefully hand him the deed to the 18th century and thank him for sparing us the exhausting burden of remembering it.