Before I was cynical, I was a kid with a Miss America lunchbox and a genuine belief I’d grow up to wear a red, white, and blue hoop skirt.
This week: the full machinery of the 1976 Bicentennial — Little House on the Prairie priming me for pioneer life, a Martha Washington biography that rerouted me straight into colonial gowns, the Miss America pageant’s bicentennial opening number, and every variety show in America doing a patriotic sketch — and how thoroughly it worked on a kid whose brain wasn’t even fully cooked yet.
Then: the adult reckoning.
Turns out all that flag-waving was engineered a few years after Watergate and the fall of Saigon, which tracks less like organic pride and more like parents plowing ahead with the family reunion while the marriage quietly falls apart.
I talk about what it’s like to hold the nostalgia and the disillusionment at the same time, why this year’s 250th anniversary is coasting on fumes by comparison — no commemorative Grimace cups in sight, no theme packaging, no Oreos, nothing — and why I’m still doing the bar-b-que and the red-white-and-blue this year anyway.
