America turns 250 today.
Ho hum.
(Today in Australia. It's all about the time stamp on this post, and it will show as July 4th only if I post on July 4th in my own time zone.)
It's a Saturday, so I could have really done something extravagant, movie-wise, to celebrate it. I could have set up a day's worth of Revolutionary War movies. I could have set up a marathon of movies about American politicians who did good in the world. I could have even done a less overtly patriotic series of movies that I felt exemplified the "American spirit" -- the best version of that concept, not the worst.
Instead, I'm doing nothing.
I might sneak in a cheeky 10 a.m. viewing of the movie 100 Nights of Hero, about which I know nothing. But that's it.
The U.S. has just fallen too much in my estimation to feel like really celebrating anything this weekend.
I know that at any given time, somewhere close to half of the people in the U.S. share my personal values. Sometimes it's a little more, and sometimes it's a little less.
But in 2024, that percentage was not enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House a second time. And just look at extraordinary amount of grift, corruption, malfeasance, hatred and general negativity that decision has introduced into our world, for a second time.
Some people thought the states' fall from grace dated back to 2016, when Trump was elected the first time. Heck, if you want to go more broadly, you can wring your hands over any number of moments in those 250 years, in which America ceased to be the thing the founders created it to be. But let's not get so macroscopic that we ruin the ability to examine this most recent version of America.
In retrospect, I can't blame Americans for voting in Trump the first time. Sure his behavior was ghastly in that election season, and the revelations we learned about him, beyond those we already knew, should have been disqualifying. But he had not yet been president and it was not yet possible to know how he would do the job, and whether his vaunted business instincts would be surprisingly great for the country.
Once they learned these instincts were not great, Americans wisely selected a different choice in 2020. And restored my faith in them as recently as six years ago.
Four years after that, though, they voted him back in. Even knowing who he was. Even knowing how he had tried to overthrow the government when he was not reelected. Even knowing he planned to establish policies that would be terrible for brown people and immigrants. Even knowing that he was guilty of criminal conspiracies, sexual indiscretions, and possibly pedophilia, and that he would use every available arm of government to try to punish his political enemies.
That's when America lost me.
The thing is, when you are in an abusive relationship -- as are many of us with the country we are supposed to love -- it's usually a rollercoaster. It's never permanently up, and it's never permanently down. There's a very good chance that this November, I will feel some renewed pride when congress is handed back to the Democrats. Two years after that, it is very likely the presidency will also be handed back to the Democrats. The "good guys," if I want to try to bring this post back to movies in some way.
But even with a country that was founded on promise, I can't celebrate America today just on the basis of that promise. I can only soberly acknowledge what I see, which is a country that has displayed its worst instincts a lot more often than its best.
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