The America 250 Party Summer that wasn’t. Who couldn’t see that one coming?

Donald Trump’s HeeHaw Follies—the UFC lawn fight, the “Great American State Fair,” the whites-only Patriot Games, the “IndyCar Freedom 250 Grand Prix”—were a sneering sucker punch not just to his bicoastal enemies but to all of us. He hijacked America’s birthday celebration with corporate jumbotron attractions that were absolutely meaningless, though they worked hard to glorify the tastes of white MAGA nationalism. As Trump’s 4H-style propaganda fair failed to draw crowds, his cabinet hit Fox News to hype some truly bizarre aspects of American life: “People are enjoying the United States of America because it’s an awesome place. We have extraordinary things like Buc-ee’s and Chick-Fil-A, very convenient to eat in your car while you’re having a phone call.”

Hear that, all you strip-mall hot tub salesmen? Your lifestyle is the envy of the world!

The World Cup was the one bright spot during Trump’s heatstroke fair. Americans were nice to strangers at a time when their government was beating them, putting them in cages, and sending them to South Sudan. But the FIFA goodwill had nothing to do with us being a democracy for 250 years. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 38% of respondents (40% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans) don’t think the United States will even exist as a single country 250 years from now.

As we head into Labor Day weekend, we’re looking at a Capitol region physically in tatters. The Reflecting Pool debacle unfolded like an Aesop fable, leaving a fenced-off, half-drained and scaling algae backwater. The demolished East Wing lies in humiliated rubble. The grass is still dead where the UFC fight was staged. “8647” is still visible burned in the lawn near the Washington Monument. The twin Arts of War statues near the Lincoln Memorial look like foil-wrapped chocolate coins. The first take on the tacky presidential seal helipad has already been demolished and is being rebuilt. The Kennedy Center stands like an ISIS hostage with its façade shrouded as Commerce Secretary/Epstein Islander Howard Lutnick threatens to tear it down if Trump’s name is not put back.

Yeah, there’s an absurd back-burner war incinerating parts of the Middle East and tariffs and oil blockages working against everything we purchase. But it’s more than that. The very idea of “America” feels like a Stranger Things establishing shot with an eerie void of adult forms. All the Republican Congress does is get asked questions by MeidasTouch as they walk up and down the Capitol steps. They don’t legislate, oversee, or investigate. They don’t even participate in government. Same for the Supreme Court, whose majority knows only acquiescence and surrender. They just lob the ball back to a Congress that’s already in recess. There’s a radical vacancy of reason, an emptiness that’s worse than COVID lockdown.

How did we get so low, and in every aspect of communal life?

If you’re Chuck Schumer or the ex-Republican never-Trumpers, this reckoning is 100% Trump: When he goes, it all goes back to normal. A less facile answer: It’s caused by the generations-long Republican lie machine to which half the country happily feeds dollars to sacrifice their financial wellbeing. The real answer, however, is much harder to swallow: The realization that America’s systemic, capitalism-fueled inequality has destroyed our empire and our democracy simultaneously . . . and we all remain complicit dupes.

Complicit dupes? you might ask; how so? Let’s take two examples from the America 250 Party Summer that wasn’t.

Whitewashed Corn

One seemingly innocent and Trump-less event in August was the annual Field of Dreams game in Dyersville, Iowa. Though I unfortunately knew the inspiration, I knew nothing about this annual tourist attraction that began in 2021, when Major League Baseball laid out an old-time playing field within the cornfields where Phil Alden Robinson shot the 1989 movie. The Yankees and the White Sox played an inaugural game there wearing 1920 uniforms. And guess who did the play-by-play? You got it: Mr. Yellowstone himself, Kevin Costner.

I found this year’s clips showing Minnesota Twins and Philadelphia Phillies players emerging from the outfield cornstalks utterly bizarre. (As we know from Stephen King’s 1977 story “Children of the Corn” and the 1984 film based on it—as well as from the vast literature of corn-based horror—cornfields are incredibly creepy and instill a sinister sense of dread.) More bizarre still was watching 26 new inductees of the Baseball Hall of Fame do the same. I can think of nothing more emasculating than having “old-timers” (in their fifties and sixties?) miming the actions of Hollywood’s sanitized ghosts. Had they not seen Jurassic World? “Don’t go into the long grass,” dudes! The raptors of marginalizing condescension have got your jersey number.

What Field of Dreams is good at is using white rural mythology to iron out the kinks of human complexity and societal injustice. It’s an idiotic movie starting from the marketing: You don’t “build” a field on an existing field. You clear it and then you landscape. But that’s a minor league critique. The major one is its mission to restore the unassailable virtue of the golden athlete, the simplistic belief that the awe enveloping raw talent always makes good.

A year before Robinson’s movie, John Sayles’s Eight Men Out offered a sympathetic take on the Chicago White Sox players accused of accepting gambling money to throw the 1919 World Series. All eight got off the hook legally but were barred for life from playing professional ball. Sayles’s film had its maudlin side but did not seek to exculpate the exiled, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, who didn’t get his nickname for being too poor to buy shoes—and who did pocket the gamblers’ five grand. Though harsh, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s lifetime ban for Jackson and the others was the only way to stop the game’s incipient corruption—or at least stave it off for another hundred years.

Field of Dreams chose to canonize Jackson, making him the star ghost in this fairytale about the unfairness of talented white men being cheated out of doing what they love. Imagine that! White men who didn’t get their fair shake! didn’t get their chance at glory! (Spoiler alert: “Innocence” ends when you are paid to do what you claim to love.) The plotting doles out convoluted ghost-game rules like a fantasy baseball quant’s fever dream. This gives the illusion of logic when we’re being fed emotional hokum. Like the absurd casting of James Earl Jones as the Virgil character in Costner’s Dantesque journey of white male grievance. Really? This Black guy is seriously lamenting the lost shot of Archie “Moonlight” Graham and not of Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige and thousands of others in the Negro Leagues?

It is said that people love Field of Dreams because they love baseball. But this fatuous story that Americans continue to lap up draws from decades of wounded denial about tarnished idols. It blends juvenile score-settling with a menacing fear of baseball becoming less “heartland” (that is, less white). I thought of this while reading “The Delusions of John Roberts,” Margaret Talbot’s recent New Yorker profile of the Supreme Court Chief Justice, who famously used a baseball metaphor during his 2005 confirmation hearings (“judges are like umpires, and their job is to call balls and strikes, not to pitch or bat”). As if to underscore his “golden-boy aura of inevitability” during those hearings, Roberts mentioned the “endless fields of Indiana stretching to the horizon, punctuated only by an isolated silo or a barn.”

Only problem is: Roberts spent his northern Indiana childhood not on a farm but in an exclusive, serene upper-middle-class enclave on the shores of Lake Michigan. Clearly, this man who worked in the Reagan administration recognized the power of Field of Dreams mythmaking. That movie is the non plus ultra of the Reagan trance decade, and maybe that’s the reason Americans keep taking in new versions of the same propaganda without question.

Grand Old Poverty

With Dolly Parton’s passing not long after the cornfields game, the memorializing of her talents and goodness provided emotional catharsis to many who needed a good cry. They saw this sad event as an opportunity to bring people together. Along with that vibe, however, has come a sentimentalizing of midcentury rural Tennessee as some twangy southern pastoral. Americans are always looking for a reason to believe in down-home; it’s our default setting. But while Dolly was one in a billion, her family wasn’t unique in its poverty, about which there is nothing proud or noble.

Why did FDR push for the Tennessee Valley Authority as a New Deal priority? Because Tennessee was the poorest state in the nation in 1933: per capita income was only 44% of the national average (and this was when U.S. unemployment reached its Depression peak of 25%); crude birth rates were more than double the national average; only 1% of farm owners had indoor plumbing, 4% telephones, and 8% radios. The TVA built hydroelectric plants and then coal-fired steam plants throughout the valley, but many residents didn’t get access to electricity until the 1960s, when the state finally enjoyed an economic boom.

Today, Tennessee has moved up to number 10 for states with the highest percentage of residents living below the poverty line. Over 93 years, that’s some kind of progress, though a GOP-friendly redistricting this spring took away the state’s lone Democratic seat, the 9th Congressional District, making 100% of its U.S. House and Senate representation Republican along with 77% of its State Legislature.

The best modern parable I know about Tennessee and wigs is “Bart on the Road,” the 1996 Simpsons episode where Bart makes a fake driver’s license and takes a road trip with his friends to Knoxville, expecting the 1982 World’s Fair to still be going on. He’d seen pictures of the Sunsphere and wanted to go up there, which is exactly what kids do: get something in their head until it ferments into much greater meaning. After discovering that the event ended 14 years before (literally too late to the fair), the boys learn that the Sunsphere is warehousing 16,000 boxes of unsold wigs for the Knoxville Wig Outlet. To see the Sunsphere, they must buy wigs. Bart even has to take a courier job to earn them the gas money to get home to Springfield. His Tennessee Odyssey is a search for something that no longer exists: not just a theme park (there’s still Dollywood!) but a genuine belief in a better future. And this is the fantasy in which most of America is still stuck.

Having anticipated every possible permutation of contemporary American life, The Simpsons is our Canterbury Tales. It’s telling that for the past 36 years, the truest stories of America’s eternal adolescence have been told through the life of an eternal child and his eternal-child father. Bart, Homer, and practically everyone in Springfield are hooked on capitalism’s drug of nonstop emotional stimulation, desperate for escapist, voyeuristic entertainment. In a world where video clips of people falling down provide never-ending amusement, you never have to think about the future—whether it’s the day the national debt hits $40 trillion (August 23, 2026) or how rationalizing a professional ball player’s reasons for throwing a game might eventually lead to a Supreme Court decision making sports betting legal (May 14, 2018) and thereby joining Major League Baseball and the gambling industry at the hip.

Endless Summer

America’s eternal adolescence makes us mind-numbingly weak in relation to the world’s developed economies. What if Venezuela’s earthquake and 6,500 dead had occurred 1,370 miles north, in Miami? That’s more than twice the 9/11 death toll. Forget enduring the horrors of war as the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and the Ukrainians must do; we couldn’t even handle the disastrous conservative austerity measures in the U.K. without having a national meltdown. Look at our crybaby take on COVID, both in 2020 and now, six years later, when Republicans are retroactively larping as humanity’s Karens. MAGA resents and loathes Europe and Canada because their citizens are able to think for the collectivity and confront vulnerability. As eternal adolescents, we can’t do that.

Our wish to live in a bubble of delusion would not be so globally tragic if we didn’t have the ravages of climate change bearing down on us right now, years earlier than predicted. This past summer, Europe got that the melting arctic is affecting their part of the world first and fast—a realization echoed by the collapse of a melting Himalayas glacier and the horrific flooding it caused in Nepal just seven minutes later. Meanwhile, America’s primary grievance all summer has been the price of gas. We started a war that is assaulting the global economy, but gas costs a dollar more. After 9/11, many young Americans selflessly joined the military, but our “decider” president did not tell them to join the military: he told them and the rest of the country to go shopping. At one of America’s most pivotal moments in modern life, our commander in chief gave a high school yearbook message: Don’t ever change.

The only way Democrats can save America from a maniac who could take down the entire planet is to hammer home that gas costs a dollar more and hopefully take back Congress. In the longshot chance that such legislation would ever get through Congress, Medicare for All would solve a problem from 40 years ago that most western countries don’t even have and don’t have on their list of the two most dire: the disruptions of an antically changing climate and antically “smarter” AI.

Within our foolish, rudderless Ticketmaster democracy, these existential worries—along with a looming bond market implosion, AI bubble collapse, and the death of the global dollar—barely register to the masses. They know something’s wrong when they look at a demolished White House and feel bereft. But I don’t know if the malaise over gas prices will ever turn into something deeper.

The one meme that strangely offered some hope this summer was Pope Hat Night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, where attendees were given White Sox-logo cardboard miters. What a strangely fortuitous thing that the first American Pope is a White Sox fan—talk about Reverse the Curse! I can only hope those wearing the hats know some of the things Pope Leo has been saying about kindness to the poor and to strangers (or are at least ready to start listening). If not, this was just another fantasyland installment of our eternal adolescence . . . a road trip worthy of Bart and the boys. §