The year 1976 was a very, very good year in my own estimation as a pipsqueak who had only seen nine summers. It was the bicentennial and what a huge, big, exciting deal the bicentennial was in 1976. Every child in America owned a felt tricorn hat and a small, pocket-size copy of the Declaration of Independence, and there were fireworks exploding in chrysanthemums everywhere in the sky overhead. I swear to you, hand to God, that I saw a giant firework explode in the shape of George Washington’s face above the Devon Yacht Club on July 4, 1976.
Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey, and Mrs. Melvin Bennett — the “cake lady” of Old Stone Highway, a sainted figure in the hearts of East Hampton children, and I can still taste her chocolate frosting and visualize the ballerina she piped for my birthday when I turned 11 — judged a patriotic-cake-decorating contest in Herrick Park. Marchers on horseback paraded down Main Street waving flags and wearing stars-and-stripes vests.
The soundtrack to the bicentennial summer was “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band. (It’s a chart-topping pop song that I thought was about fireworks displays in my childish naïveté but that, upon refreshing my memory just now on YouTube, turns out to be an easy-listener performed by a man in leisure pants and a Luke-from-“General Hospital” white-man perm, about “workin’ up an appetite” in anticipation of “a lot of lovin’ before the sun goes down.” It’s a total dog of a one-hit wonder, but I whistled along at the time. I learned to whistle between my teeth in 1976.) My favorite bicentennial treat was a red, white, and blue torpedo-shaped Bomb Pop from the Dune Doggie. Happy days on Indian Wells Beach.
We took a family road trip to Colonial Williamsburg and ate popovers in a tavern. (Actually, my most vivid memory of this special road trip is of realizing I badly needed to go to the bathroom as I sat in the station wagon in front of the Star office, as we hurried to hit the highway, but not mentioning it until we had made it all the way down to Virginia because the family was already bickering in the car.) I remember standing on a parched lawn watching re-enactors drilling in formation in white breeches. We stayed in a motel with coin-operated Magic Fingers beds. We got toy muskets with a metal hammer that went “pop!” went you tugged on the trigger. It was a national festival.
Have you seen or heard anything from the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission and its America250 campaign? No?
Well, 2026 is our semiquincentennial year, in case you hadn’t clocked our upcoming big anniversary — what with apocalyptic comets inbound and war crimes popping off every three seconds — and if you haven’t heard much about America250 and are curious how the birthday planning is going, I invite you to scroll on over to the American250 program’s social media sites for a good dose of heavy depression with your Thursday morning Nespresso.
Note the most-liked post on the America250 Instagram is a heroic, black-and-white memorial tribute to the late Charlie Kirk, seen striding through fog from a smoke machine. Note the not-a-spoof-but-apparently-serious video posted on that Instagram on July 3 in which an assortment of dazed Americans in full battle-rattle MAGA gear struggle to come up with a reply to the prompt, “In one word, what does America mean to you?” (I watched it so you don’t have to. It’s a series of people in an explosion of Uncle Sam tat and hats — in an outdoor festival setting that may be a county fair, a Lee Greenwood concert, or an underattended semiquincentennial rally — bobbing at the waist to lean over the microphone, ponder for a beat, and spit out the word, “Freedom.”) If entertained by snarky social-media clap-backs, you might get a chuckle out of some of the retorts in the comments section under the American250 post proclaiming “A New Era of American Greatness.” Whooo-doggie! America250 is sad, my fellow Americans. It’s so sad.
Maybe don’t scroll over there, after all. Someone has stolen our tricorn hat.
The bicentennial year, 1976, was a high water mark for everything the current American president and his followers love to loathe, come to think of it. Buffy Sainte-Marie on “Sesame Street,” encouraging America’s preschoolers to resist gender-based stereotypes. Gay romance on the disco dance floor to the beat of Diana Ross’s “Love Hangover.” Do you remember the words to “William’s Doll,” from “Free to Be You and Me” (“Don’t be a sissy, said his best friend Ed”)? Woody Allen movies in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton shut up an intellection blowhard, waiting behind them on line to see “The Sorrow and the Pity” (“The Sorrow and the Pity”!), by waving over Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of media theory. Marshall McLuhan! Intellectuals! Philosophers!
Well, God Bless Ken Burns. It’s de rigueur in Washington right now to plaster leaders’ glowering likenesses and gilded names all over public buildings; maybe we should unfurl a banner of Ken Burns’s face over the facade of the Smithsonian. This month, as we race toward the semiquincentennial 00 countdown! 10, nine, eight, six-seven! — the coastal elites are all putting on their jammies each night and settling into their tasteful Restoration Hardware couches to watch Ken Burns’s “The American Revolution.” And this cultural event — group-watching a documentary miniseries about history en masse, as we used to all share, say, viewings nightly of Walter Cronkite — is fully reminding me of the 1970s. Isn’t it a delight to see all these academics and history writers up on the screen, saying intelligent things in complete sentences, calmly and lucidly? I just love academics and university professors. I love their tweedy hearts and their poker faces. I’m not supposed to talk about politics in this column. I promised I wouldn’t when I began writing it in July of 2020. Well, this column isn’t politics. It’s social observation, okay?
Despite being — like the insufferable loudmouth behind Woody Allen on line to see “The Sorrow and the Pity” — habitually over-sure of my own intellectual keenness and correctness, I will resist the temptation to swerve my narrative right here onto the topic of the time-warp (perception-warp?) presented by the fact that 1976 was 50 years ago, and 50 years is mathematically a full quarter of the way back in time, the 200 years, between 1976 and 1776. The shrinking centuries are a mystery for another week.