Dwain Northey (Gen X)

America’s 250th Birthday: Now Featuring Indy Cars and Concrete Walls

Well, folks, Donnie’s grand 250th birthday celebration in Washington, D.C., is shaping up exactly as one might expect when you combine an ego the size of a presidential library, a city that was not designed to accommodate whatever the hell you’re doing, and a desperate need to make America look spectacular for the rest of the world.

And how’s that going?

Well… Indy cars are crashing into walls.

So there’s that.

Nothing says “America at 250: The greatest nation on Earth” quite like watching high-performance race cars discover that Washington, D.C., is, surprisingly, a city rather than the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Apparently, somebody looked at the streets of the nation’s capital and thought, “You know what this needs? Race cars.”

Because obviously the thing D.C. has been missing all these years is a bunch of Indy cars screaming through streets designed for government workers, tourists, buses, bicycles, protesters and the occasional motorcade.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, as it turns out, quite a bit.

The problem with turning Washington into a temporary amusement park for presidential birthday festivities is that Washington is still a functioning city. People actually live there. People work there. People have to get somewhere. There are intersections, traffic lights, narrow streets, monuments, buildings and, apparently, walls.

Those pesky walls.

And now we’re disrupting traffic so that race cars can race through the capital while occasionally demonstrating the fundamental principle of physics: when you drive a very fast car into a wall, the wall generally wins.

But hey, don’t worry about the traffic.

This is about the world stage.

And what a stage it is.

Imagine being some foreign tourist watching coverage of America’s 250th birthday and thinking, “Wow. They really have their act together.”

You have a president staging a gigantic celebration around himself, streets shut down, traffic snarled, expensive race cars bouncing off concrete, and the entire spectacle unfolding in the capital of the free world.

Nothing embarrassing about that.

It’s not a national celebration so much as America’s Got Ego: Presidential Edition.

And that’s really the problem with Donnie’s version of the 250th anniversary. Instead of celebrating the country—its history, its institutions, its people, its successes and even its spectacular failures—we seem to be celebrating one guy’s interpretation of America.

Because apparently 250 years of American history wasn’t quite enough spectacle.

We needed DonniePalooza.

More noise. More spectacle. More disruption. More opportunities for the cameras to point toward Donnie.

And now, apparently, Indy cars.

I suppose we should be grateful they haven’t installed a roller coaster on the National Mall.

Give it time.

Maybe next week we’ll have monster trucks jumping over the Lincoln Memorial while a fireworks display spells out “DON’T YOU MISS ME?” in the sky.

Of course, supporters will tell us that this is what greatness looks like.

And they’re absolutely right.

If by greatness you mean spending enormous amounts of energy making an enormous spectacle while occasionally forgetting that the country itself is supposed to be the star of the celebration.

America is 250 years old.

That’s pretty damn remarkable.

We survived a revolution, a Civil War, two world wars, economic depressions, pandemics, social upheaval, political scandals, disco, mullets and the invention of the internet.

We could probably celebrate that without turning Washington into a demolition derby.

But apparently subtlety wasn’t invited to the birthday party.

So here’s to America’s 250th.

May the traffic eventually move.

May the race cars stay out of the walls.

And may the rest of the world look at Washington and conclude that this is exactly what a confident, mature, 250-year-old democracy looks like.

Because nothing says “We’re the greatest country on Earth” quite like desperately trying to prove it with a really loud party.

And a few concrete barriers.