The Thousand-Year Experiment
The uneasy 250th birthday of the United States of America, as reflected in the NFL, the lives of my family members, and the Verrazzano Bridge.
I live in the shadow of the Verrazzano Bridge, which spans New York Harbor, and where the first hostilities of the American Revolution took place, with rebels firing canon at approaching British ships.
It’s a dramatic landscape, and a gorgeous structure. Not long after I moved to the neighborhood, this incredible bridge had its 50th anniversary. But the celebration was muted, sparsely attended, and scarcely noticed.
The bridge has its detractors. On the Brooklyn side, the tolls were too high, leading many politicians to boycott the festivities. On the Staten Island side, the bridge had brought traffic. And there were ancient gripes among the older residents, who’d passed them down. On the Brooklyn side, hundreds of families had their homes eminent-domained and demolished. On the Staten Island side, the bridge had ruined its splendid isolation. To the city’s intelligentsia, the bridge was the crown jewel of Robert Moses’ hated vision for New York City. To the young, its lack of a bicycle or pedestrian crossing made it inaccessible and oppressive.
It still strikes me as odd that something so grand and visually beautiful could me the site of such powerfully mixed emotions. But here we are.
I want to write about America on its 250th birthday. I’ve been alive for just about fifty years - one fifth of that history. I’ve lived all but a few months here. And while I’ve taken some guff for having too free a mind or too free a tongue over the years, I never feared for my safety because of them. And only in recent years have I feared for my livelihood.
This independence of thought and speech is a gift of no small significance. I owe it to my nation and to the many difficult people who treasured and protected that gift as it made its way to me.
The two hundredth anniversary happened before I was born, and there was a giant mural of George Washington’s scowling countenance within a bunting-laden star in downtown Worcester when I was coming up.
Numbers have their own characters. Two hundred is really different from two fifty. Two hundred is a nice stack of decades, like cut cordwood. You can sit back and be pleased yourself for having gotten to 200 of almost anything. Two hundred is an accomplishment. Two hundred stands in a miraculous relation to zero, and a privileged relation to one hundred.
Two hundred fifty, as a number, has a very different character. The first thing you notice about 250, is that it’s a quarter of 1,000. At 250, you’ve gotten out of the business of hundreds and into the business of thousands. And from the looks of it, you’re you have a lot more wood to chop.
This is another reason why despite the hype, people are wary to talk much about this anniversary. We don’t have as much faith in the future, or ourselves these days.
When I was little, in Massachusetts, I’d still see the occasional DON’T BLAME US, WE DIDN’T DO IT bumper stickers - a reference to the Bay State being the only one Nixon failed to win in 1972, shortly before his disgrace and resignation.
We were an American family - two-car garage and visits with extended relatives visited mostly on holidays. My grandparents had been in the country for more than a century, or two generations, or came here in their teens. My parents went to college and changed careers at least twice to keep on the right side the job market.
The America I was born into was fundamentally different than it had once been. Electricity had been in common use for less than a century, which seemed important. No one talked about how peculiar electricity was to the human condition, however, which seemed odd to me as a kid. Maybe they were worried they’d break the spell.
Refrigerators and TVs are a huge deal, as was (and is) the threat of nuclear annihilation. That development came into existence all at once, more recently still, roughly as close to my birth as the first-ever #1 hip-hop single is to today. No one talked about how peculiar nuclear weapons were to the human condition, however, which seemed odd to me as a kid.
America was always a thing in flux. My family lived between the angry and fading shadow of industrial Worcester, and the burgeoning and prosperous tech suburbs along routes 495 and 128. The landscape told of time. Later, my parents moved to Natick, Massachusetts, which had three centers - the old, picturesque and little-used one on the Charles River, the denser one with three story-buildings lining the main drag by the railroad stop, then the newest one on Route 9, by the exit to the Mass Pike.
Then they divorced, my mother moving to Long Island to by her sister, and my father to the Research Triangle of North Carolina for its low cost of living, ample golf courses, and quality medical care.
As I said, flux.
September Eleventh happened about halfway through my life as an American. I was in the city that day, and spent most of it downtown on the West Side Highway.
When I got home after midnight, my father had left a message on my answering machine, telling me not to join the army. He’d been an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam, through the Tet Offensive, and was the last of his officer his class still in the field when he was shot. He was right to warn me it. At twenty-four, I’d never had much truck with patriotism, righteous anger, or warmongering - and it was intoxicating in the extreme.
I wasn’t alone. People look back on the months after 9/11 as a time of inspiring unity. And unity, with precious few exceptions, is intoxication. The Londoners in enduring Nazi bombs may have felt a strong sense of unity, but so did the Nazis. Do not operate heavy machinery - not a Prius, not a forklift, and certainly not a nation state - while under the influence of unity.
When America was unified, we did some things that we could possibly justify, but couldn’t be particularly proud of. We started wars. We violated the rights of our citizens. We curtailed freedoms. And most of us didn’t see anything wrong with any of it, until later.
This is one reason that a muted and contentious response to the 250th year of our nation may be something more laudatory and patriotic than a full-throated celebration. The last guy to say the word unity and one thousand years in the same speech was, we all still agree, the worst guy ever. And the Founders of our nation agreed on precious little, and made ample room for continual disagreement in their Constitution.
Today, the NFL is one place I most often encounter the unguarded mass musings of the United States of America. The league presents itself as a place where our fondest fantasies of the nation are put into play - it’s a place where talent and hard work are reliably rewarded, where the rules are reliably enforced, where the rules change to keep unfair advantages or excessive damage from accruing, and where the deck is regularly reshuffled.
The ads, however, address the actual lives of the viewers. Last season graced us with taglines like: “You can’t count on much, but you can count on Sundays,” while our employers swore - as loud as they could - to their shareholders that they’d replace us all with AI. Then YouTube had its “Enjoy this moment of Zen,” reducing the thousand-year tradition of patient self-mastery to a ten-second break from being exploited for even our attention. Then came the truck ad that boasts, “Whoever said ‘work smarter not harder,’ didn’t realize you could do both,” as though the last two generations hadn’t bankrupted themselves for the education that might free them from crushing labor and desperation.
In America, getting it has always been possible. Keeping it is what makes everyone crazy and, eventually, evil. The keeping it part seems to be the bit that’s turning this place into a nightmare. Bank bailouts, private security, venture capital, the national debt, immigration raids, mergers and acquisitions, offshoring, and luxury bunkers.
Prices increase. Fear rolls downhill. We all dress, labor, and speak to appease some master, while proclaiming a nonspecific freedom on the Fourth of July. Just freedom in general, with no offense to our parents, employers, neighbors, home-owners associations, and the financial institutions who have staked a claim on our futures. We often say freedom because we don’t want to offend (see March’s “This Call Is Being Recorded”). Meanwhile the world gets ruled by guys with the supervillain’s credo on their lips: Who’s going to stop me? You?
It’s a bad game, one that runs on the proposition that there’s no way out. It’s a game that likes to act like depression is some mystery. I saw it coming at the age of fifteen and still got wound up in it.
A quarter-millennium into the United States of America, it’s fair to ask what we’re really all about.
The Great Experiment is a generous and forgiving way to look at it. It’s open-ended and optimistic. Originally, the idea was that popular democracy was the thing that’s being experimented with, and that the outcome here in America would tell us whether or not we, as a species, were smart to behead all those regents.
I still like the name and the sentiment, but for different reasons. Today, America is the oldest country in the world. Not the oldest people, ethnicity, or set of traditions, but the oldest continuous government. It’s the deepest dipstick of history, intention and organization sunk into the turbid miasma of human nature.
It’s still The Great Experiment, but something else is being tested.
The other day, I took my daughter to an exhibit to learn about the Battle of Brooklyn - the first military contest of the Revolutionary War. Washington was routed up by Prospect Park, spent his best troops defending his retreat by the Gowanus Canal, and was lucky to escape across the East River in a heavy fog. Brooklynites thereafter avoided talking about the battle for a hundred years.
The gentleman who polished George Washington’s spyglass that day, and at subsequent battles a quarter millennium ago went on to live to a ripe old age. And he never saw a minute of freedom. You can’t ignore that.
America isn’t its government. And America isn’t its economy. America is a bright flame with terrible fumes.
America likes to think it’s a jolly slugger, when it’s a crowd of utility infielders hoofing out slow rolling ground balls to stay on the team.
America, as I was raised to understand it, and as the hordes of people who undergo incredible difficulties and indignities to be here also seem to believe, is humanity’s last best hope. And humanity’s been getting increasingly unpopular with itself these last fifty years.
If one big thing is different from the 1976 birthday, that’s where I’d peg it. And opinions change, just not always in time for the fireworks.
Selected bibliography
Albert Brooks’ A Phone Call to Americans