Bad Fascist Party
At the Great American State Fair, a celebration of death.
This story first appeared in In These Times magazine.
“Are you all ready for the most epic party in all of American history?” asked Monica Crowley, the U.S. government’s protocol chief, from a podium on a towering stage set gracelessly in the middle of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Hell —we sure are. Better than Mardi Gras? Better than Woodstock? Better than the Boston Tea Party, Burning Man, or Freaknik? Sounds good. America has had a tough few years. We’ve made it to our 250th anniversary. We deserve a reward. We are ready to party.
But from whence shall our party come? Taking in the scene in downtown Washington on June 24, it was clear that the most epic party in U.S. history is not going to come from the people who have arranged a portion of the Mall into a heavily militarized version of Epcot. This, the formal kickoff for the “Great American State Fair,” which will celebrate America’s wasted stumble through its first quarter-millennium, was less of a party than a symbolic embodiment of the presently dominant vision of our nation as Shit Disneyland—a fake place that you have to stand in line for a long time to get in, even though you don’t really want to be there.
One of the only nice things about downtown Washington, D.C. is the fact that anyone can stroll freely through the Mall. Now that’s been ended. To celebrate America, security fencing has been erected and entry is restricted to a couple of access points that are manned by heavily armed National Guard, Metro Police, Park Police, Capitol Police, U.S. Marshals, Secret Service, TSA, and anyone else capable of carrying a gun and doing seemingly nothing at all. All of this to access a space that consists of: sod. The grass is nice. Unbroken by a single tree, its greenness under the broiling sun is a nod to the golf course style that is fascism’s highest aesthetic.
“When you walk around Washington, D.C.,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, one of the night’s warmup acts, “not only is it safe again. It’s beautiful again.” As she spoke, a line of black-clad snipers were clearly visible on the roof of the Agriculture Department headquarters across the street. Their rifles commanded the entire field of sweltering sod. These square blocks of our nation’s capitol, from 12th to 14th street, have been made both safe and beautiful, simply by fencing them off, filling them with soldiers, and redesigning them as a suburban lawn. First, these blocks, and next, the world.
You might already know the humiliating backstory of this entire event: first it was announced as a big concert, and then the announced acts—all the way down to Milli Vanilli and Bret Michaels—pulled out in fear of public backlash, prompting a petulant President Donald Trump to declare that he would “take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward.” So the unlucky planners of the event were forced to cobble together a show plausible enough to satisfy the president’s ego, without the benefit of any actual celebrities.
The resulting event leaned heavily on speeches by second-tier members of the cabinet and music from the Marine Corps band, giving it the air of a boss who threw a birthday party and required his employees to attend. To honor the total capture of America’s institutions by cronyist incompetence, Alexis Wilkins, the country singer girlfriend of podcaster-turned-FBI Director Kash Patel, sung the national anthem. Christopher Macchio, a Trumpian crooner, did a cruise ship version of “Hallelujah.” The military band sent up uniformed singers and guitar players for karaoke-level covers of “Gloria” and “Walking on Sunshine.”
The whole thing felt like a show that might be inflicted upon a desultory crowd of students at a reform school, forced by their principal to listen to the hits of the past, with the threat of juvenile hall looming over anyone who made a wisecrack.
Who goes to an event like this? One answer is “not many people.” Despite the grandiosity of the occasion, the crowd did not even fill the Mall all the way from 14th to 12th street, meaning it was about one square block-and-a-half’s worth of dead enders. Subtract the security forces and the prowling journalists and the temp workers in neon orange “EFFORT LLC” shirts cursed to pick up trash, and what you were left with was a meager mixture of lost young bros in golf shirts, doddering grandparents, tourist families in American flag apparel and church people. One of the latter leapt out at me as soon as I entered.
“Has anyone ever told you that God loves you and has a plan for your life?” he asked me from close range. It struck me, somehow, as a threat. This was not the sort of crowd that you want making plans for your life under any circumstances.
Lee Greenwood, a pickled husk of a man, came out and sang “God Bless the USA” in a thin and reedy voice. My bus driver in elementary school played a cassette version of that song every single day he drove us home in the 1980s. Like the United States itself, it has aged poorly. Trump doddered out and began speaking in his weird declarative manner. His topic, as best I could tell, is that America is good. His method, proven effective by time, is simply to restate this point over and over in different words.
“Together, we’re making it bigger and better and stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before,” he proclaimed. “We have the greatest culture on earth.”
Do we? People clapped, but I feel comfortable saying that few people on the Mall yesterday have spent much time in deep, respectful study of all the other cultures of the world. “Nobody is laughing at us anymore!” declared Trump, like a school shooter explaining himself.
“We banned the transgender MUTILIZATION of children,” he said, to cheers.
“We’re taking power back from the far-off political class,” he said, while standing just blocks from his home, the White House. Then, as he likes to do to test his audience’s patience, he launched into meandering asides about the Grand Prix race he has planned for D.C., and the rodeo that is coming to the Mall and his various building projects around town. He told everyone about how he had fixed up a fountain.
“That white marble is nice and clean!”
As the speech went on, more and more of the crowd began to leave — proving, I guess, that even Trump’s base has a limit to their willingness to be suckered. It is tempting to scoff at the night as one more farcical step towards America’s fate as the world’s intellectual toilet bowl. But that would be a bit too pat. There was menace here as well, the menace that fascism always ensures is at the forefront of the public imagination.
The night was punctuated by a series of flyovers by military jets. First a pair of F-16s, screaming in from over the Washington monument and peeling off in separate directions; later, a flat black stealth bomber flying low from the south. You could look up at its streaking, sawtoothed form and put yourself in the shoes of some poor people in some faraway dusty land for whom that was the last thing that they ever saw. A couple of 2,000-pound bombs dropping from that plane could have wiped out just about all of us there, and the snipers on the roof could have mopped up the rest in a minute or two.
The transformation of America’s anniversary into a pompous show of force was not just a reminder that everything we have we got at gunpoint. It was, equally, a reminder from Donald Trump that he, for now, controls the guns. His supporters laughed and clapped as the fighter jets hit their impossibly loud afterburners overhead. They could not imagine being on the opposite side of this sort of military power. Such empathy is not a part of America’s culture — the greatest culture in the world.
As he read our nation’s achievements off the teleprompter in a bored voice, there was one moment when Trump perked up.
“We won two world wars. Defeated fascism and communism,” he said. Then he interjected, “We’re gonna have to do that again.” When he’s right, he’s right. Even when he doesn’t know why.
Happy anniversary, America. The worst is yet to come.
This story first appeared in In These Times magazine.
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Related reading: You Are Invited to the Predator’s Ball, as Food; America Is Built to Feed Us Poison; Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!
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I was born in 1980. I remember as a kid reading the sanitized, patriotic revisionist version of American history, and thinking with pride how exciting it would be to celebrate the nation's 250th anniversary when I grew up.
Now the Semiquincentennial is here, and I want nothing to do with it at all.
[ … prompting a petulant President Donald Trump to declare that he would “take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’ … ]
So he originally wanted third-rate artists for the most epic party ever? Only the best for America!