The USA's 250th birthday party echoes its 150th in unfortunate ways

Happy 250th Birthday to the modern incarnation of the United States.

There is nothing new under the sun. The Guardian highlights fairly chilling parallels between the darker side of this weekend’s celebrations as convened under the current venal, fragile, egoist, hate-filled figurehead of their current administration and those seen in the equivalent occasion one hundred years ago:

The closest anniversary parallel, according to McKean, may actually be a full century ago, in 1926, a year when the US marked its 150th birthday and which also saw 15,000 white-robed Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, while a nativism redolent of Trump’s “America first” rhetoric stalked the land.

“We had just gone through a major pandemic with the Spanish flu, which had killed millions of people worldwide, not dissimilar from Covid,” said McKean. “There was also this huge sort of inequality happening in America at the time. Immigration was a big issue, and laws had been passed and signed by [then president] Calvin Coolidge to impose quotas on each country that had had immigrants coming to this country.”

Photographs like this do nothing to ease the mind:

That motley bunch of cosplay paranoid weirdos are members of Patriot Front, a Neo-Fascist group who, to quote the article, facilitated a shameful event where ‘hundreds of masked members of the white supremacist organization marched and chanted in the US capital’; shaming their country on what could and should have been a celebration of how far their nation has progressed.

This photograph strikes me as being truly one for the ages.