For the 250th, Why Not a New Name?
This column is co-published by Zócalo Public Square. Art by Joe Mathews using Gemini.
For America 250, the United States should give itself a gift bigger than cage fights or a triumphal arch.
Perfect, isn’t it?
First, we keep the acronym USA, preserving our unbeatably jingoistic chant for the World Cup, Olympics, and beyond.
Second, the name revels harder in its dishonesty. “United” remains a lie—Americans are divided, badly—which makes this a more perfect union of name and country. A scammer country’s title should be a little scammy.
Finally, the new name allows us to escape endless historical debates—America is a beacon of freedom! America is a land of oppression!—and embrace the beating heart of what this country is and has always been:
A paradise for ripping people off.
I’m not just talking about our tendency to install crooked presidents—Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, and the Great Wizard of Con Artistry Donald J. Trump.
The same cultural traits in which Americans take pride create incredibly fertile ground for fraud. Our optimism makes us trust those we shouldn’t. Our individualism means that we’re often on our own, thus easier prey for fraudsters. And our entrepreneurialism turns us into suckers for new schemes.
Hunger for opportunity and property drive our financial crimes. This country expanded thanks to the national government’s deceptions and massive theft of Indian lands. Many of our forebears were drawn west by the promise of small plots of land that were uninhabitable, owned by someone else, or didn’t exist at all on the map. America also invented the archetype of the snake-oil salesman, selling bogus cures or, in our times, serving as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Americans come in all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds, but we are all either scammers, targets of scammers, or a little bit of both. You can’t answer a phone, scan your email box, or doomscroll on social media without encountering those determined to cheat you.
Surveys show that Americans navigate 100 scam attempts a month, and that 40% of U.S. adults have been victims of some form of financial fraud or scam. The country has replaced Switzerland as the international capital of financial secrecy (and thus money laundering), and is rapidly sliding down global anti-corruption rankings. The U.S. is now seen as dirtier than Lithuania, Barbados, or the United Arab Emirates.
So, what better occasion to embrace our leadership in confidence games than during the utterly fraudulent celebration of what our political, corporate, and media institutions falsely call our 250th birthday?
The American republic started in 1789, with the adoption of the Constitution, and that republic would be 237 years old this year, except for the fact that it died last year, when Trump consolidated his dictatorship. So why not a funeral instead of a birthday party?
But the early U.S. republic was just another dull East Coast thing, like blue laws or Delaware. The America we know now didn’t exist until California and Texas, the most important states, were conquered into the faltering Union in 1848. The U.S. didn’t get to 48 states until 1912, and we didn’t become an arrogant, warmongering empire until we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
By that accounting, our national age is 80. Same as Trump.
While I’m no fan of the man, I do appreciate his willingness to celebrate both his and his country’s scamminess. Which is why I find the criticism he’s getting for Freedom 250, the White House-backed initiative and private nonprofit he formed for this moment, unfair.
Sure, Freedom 250 is yet another forum for Trump to take money from those with business before his administration. But that’s small time, compared to the billions he and his family are taking from crypto and foreign interests.
Yes, Freedom 250 put a UFC fight on the White House South Lawn, but at least it’s balanced out by a Rededicate 250 rally, with logistical support by the same company (Event Strategies Inc.) that put together the January 6 rally, to celebrate America as a Christian nation. Not even mom and apple pie are as American a combo as violence, religion, and hypocrisy!
Freedom 250 is also Trump’s scammy justification for erecting (without Congressional approval) a 250-foot-tall arch that will obscure views of Arlington Cemetery. But maybe that arch will be a blessing in disguise—it should also block those hallowed dead from looking across the river and seeing what’s become of the government they died for.
The real problem with Trump’s Freedom 250 is not tastelessness. Or that it took dollars and attention from the congressionally approved, bipartisan America 250. The real problem is that it doesn’t go far enough in celebrating our national talent for scam.
The arch is so mid. Why not, instead, build a giant dome on the Mall in the shape of a teapot, to recall America’s great 20th-century government scandal? If you want to improve the Reflecting Pool, drain it of all its precious water—like it was the Colorado River—and fill it with all-American manure.
Oh, and that monument to that priss Washington (“I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down that cherry tree”—spare me, bro) must go. In its place, how about a gargantuan statue of Charlie Ponzi and Bernie Madoff, giving each other a high five?
Those who criticize Trump’s (or your columnist’s) embrace of crooks as amoral or worse say that we should honor the USA’s Founding Fathers for their commitment to law and their loyalty to our country.
But they misunderstand American history. The Founding Fathers were great because they were criminals, at least under the laws of their times. And not just any criminals. They were avowed traitors to their country, Great Britain. King George, in his August 1775 “Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition,” declared that they were “traitorously preparing, ordering and levying war against us.”
Samuel Johnson, the preeminent British writer of his era and critic of the American Revolution, told his biographer James Boswell that the Americans “are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” Johnson wasn’t joking. That’s why Benjamin Franklin warned his fellow Declaration of Independence signers that they had two choices: “we must all hang together” or “we shall all hang separately.”
So, what’s your choice this Fourth of July? Go the traditional American route, and loyally celebrate this nation of scams with the scammer-in-chief? Or dream of a new future and plot some glorious act of treason—California independence, anyone?—over the grill?
