The Bicentennial and Someone Else's Dog

Our clematis is blooming once again, and looking a little healthier this year than last. It has never really thrived but it's hanging on.

Yesterday was unremarkable. I read The New Yorker in the morning, specifically Jill Lepore's article from a couple of months ago about the Bicentennial. As the USA prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary with all kinds of grandiose, Trumpian plans and schemes, she looked back at the 200th anniversary to see how we handled that. I was a child at the beginning of 1976 -- nine years old, to be exact -- and I remember the Bicentennial as a time of unity and celebration. As Lepore described it:

There was no end to the kitsch: Bicentennial beer mugs, flatware, dishes, glassware, placemats, and salt shakers; little glass Liberty Bells; patriotic yo-yos and egg timers; Bicentennial coffee grounds and coffeepots; Red, White ’n Blueberry ice cream; Bicentennial Barbie with a white lace mobcap, a flouncy red skirt, a blue bodice, and white pantaloons. You could get a Bicentennial auto loan and screw Bicentennial license plates onto your new car. At diners, where you likely ate off placemats made to look like replicas of the Declaration of Independence, your coffee came with Bicentennial sugar packs, displaying a short but sweet biography of an American President, and your 7 UP in a commemorative sixteen-ounce bottle. You could wipe your hands on Bicentennial towelettes, featuring a silhouette of Paul Revere on a horse. Kellogg’s ran a Bicentennial contest (“Make a picture of your favorite American Revolutionary hero—like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, or others—eating a good balanced breakfast”); entrants got a red-white-and-blue kite. Campbell’s soup cans came with an offer for a Colonial Campbell’s Kids Doll. Log Cabin maple syrup was packaged in a special Bicentennial flask.

This is the kind of stuff I remember, along with a third-grade class trip in 1975 to see NASA's Bicentennial exposition at the Kennedy Space Center. We all rode a bus across the state and I remember gigantic rockets and lots of machinery and the Vehicle Assembly Building with the Bicentennial logo on the side. (I also developed a fever on that trip and I got a vanilla shake at McDonald's -- weird what we remember.)

What I'd forgotten, or more likely never knew, is that the celebration of the Bicentennial was as mired in politics as the semisesquicentennial is now. As Lepore outlines in her article, Lyndon Johnson launched the planning with one committee, which Nixon subsequently disbanded, installing his own people. As Nixon's administration became mired in Watergate, the planning eventually fell apart, and states and cities were left to manage their own celebrations.

Hearing that it was all such a political nightmare even 50 years ago somehow puts our modern situation into perspective, though it doesn't justify Trump's expenditures on a vulgar triumphal arch and schlocky sculpture garden.

In the afternoon I went for a walk on Hampstead Heath. I really needed some exercise; now that I'm not walking to work every day, it's too easy to sit around the house. Even with all my gardening, I feel like my fitness is slipping. So yes, I am going to get out more and work off some calories. (When we get a dog that will help.)

Speaking of dogs, this random dog ran up to me with a gigantic log in its mouth, which it apparently wanted me to throw. I did, and the log broke in half, and the dog then insisted on trying to carry both halves, which led to no end of canine frustration. It was out with a dog-walker, and eventually moved on with the rest of the pack.

I also passed this leaning pine tree, which has been leaning for as long as I can remember. Over the years it has been secured with cables to adjacent trees, and been braced from beneath with two gigantic posts. I blogged it before back in 2020, before the bracing. I wonder why there's such an effort to save this bedraggled tree? It must have some historic significance. (And here's the answer, courtesy of Google: It's known as the Constable Pine, drawn by artist John Constable in the early 1800s when he lived near the Heath. I learn something new every day!)