Happy Birthday America!
Ten Things That Could Actually Unite America: A Bicentennial Rescue Mission
A friend recently accused me — gently, over drinks, the way you accuse someone of a moral failing that demands an immediate personal intervention — of squandering my writing talents on trivialities when the nation is aching for unity. Why not, he asked, use those modest talents for good? Bring people together? Be the change!
I explained, using my best “oh, you poor, naïve sap” voice, that the average American allocates roughly six and a half minutes a day to unstructured brain activity, and in those six and a half minutes, between doomscrolls and dopamine hits, they want content that either A) confirms (with righteous indignation) they were right about the President all along, or B) confirms (with righteous indignation) they were right about the President’s enemies all along. There is no version of “actual free brain time” in 2026 that has room in it for anything that preaches tolerance, kindness, and understanding. There’s certainly no room for six hundred words about boat drinks in Sarasota, a piece I wrote with real love that received, if memory serves, two likes, both from my sister (the second like was an accident).
He didn’t believe me. I asked if he’d read my latest piece about boat drinks in Sarasota. He suddenly remembered he had an appointment.
But it did get me thinking. We’re 250 years into this experiment, and somehow the country’s single unifying obsession seems to be that the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool renovation is either a symbol of American decline or a symbol of the previous administration’s complete ineptitude, depending on your feed. Nobody seems capable of agreeing that it’s just a large rectangle of water where ducks love to take a shit. Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, not one person has mentioned the ducks, who remain the only entities involved in this controversy operating in good faith. If we can’t unite behind a floating archipelago of duck feces, I wondered, what can we unite behind?
So I took my friend’s advice. I built a list. Not a list of values — values are where the hard feelings start — but a list of specific, deeply beloved, entirely indefensible American stuff. The theory being that no one, in the history of this country, has ever started a culture war over Cracker Jack (yet). And no… it’s not all about nostalgia. (Who am I kidding. It’s entirely about nostalgia. I’ve made my peace with this.)
10. The Bicentennial Quarter
In 1976, the U.S. Mint slapped a colonial drummer boy on the back of every quarter in America, and for one glorious summer, children briefly became world-class numismatists. I personally hoarded eleven of them in a Folgers coffee tin alongside several fossilized pieces of Bazooka Joe, convinced I was sitting on retirement money. I was, in fact, sitting on two dollars and seventy-five cents. To this day, a Bicentennial quarter is worth exactly twenty-five cents, a fact that took me approximately forty-nine years to accept. But for about six weeks in 1976, every kid in the country was quietly checking their change with the focused intensity of a Wall Street trader, and that, I would argue, is as close to national unity as this country has come since.
9. The Freedom Train
An actual steam locomotive, painted red white and blue, that toured all forty-eight contiguous states in 1976 carrying historical artifacts so people could stand in line for hours to look at Judy Garland’s ruby slippers next to a moon rock. Three million people boarded that train. Three million Americans, in an era with no metal detectors and, as far as I can determine, no National Guard patrols, filed past a locomotive containing George Washington’s copy of the Constitution and Joe Frazier’s boxing robe, because someone looked at a map of the country and said “what if we just drove the Smithsonian around for a year.” This objectively, made no sense. It was magnificent anyway. It is the single most American thing I’ve ever heard of, and I would like it back, ideally stopping in Sarasota so I can write about it for an audience of two.
8. CB Radios
For a brief shining moment, truckers and suburban dads across all fifty states adopted a shared vocabulary — “10-4,” “breaker breaker,” “smokey” — purely so they could talk about speed traps together. I’m not proud to report that my dad’s handle was “Big Buckeye.” But I am proud to report that as a nine-year-old, I thought that was the coolest thing my dad had ever done. Nobody’s CB handle got them fired. Nobody screenshotted a trucker’s transmission out of context and mailed it to their employer. It was, in effect, the last unregulated social network in American history, and the discourse was somehow better.
7. Evel Knievel
A man in a star-spangled jumpsuit repeatedly attempted to fly a motorcycle over things that motorcycles should not fly over, broke essentially every bone in his body doing it, and was beloved by liberals, conservatives, children, and grandmothers with equal fervor. Find me one person alive in 1976 who had a problem with Evel Knievel. You cannot. He put on the cape, revved his engine, and broke his pelvis for our entertainment, asking nothing in return but our applause and, presumably, a decent orthopedic surgeon. No billionaire space shots, no arena weddings. Now that’s public service.
6. KC and the Sunshine Band
I want to be very clear that I am not proposing “Get Down Tonight” as a unifying national anthem, mostly because I’ve tried singing it at karaoke and the results weren’t unifying so much as alarming (for reasons I can’t fully explain, possibly related to the fact that I can’t sing, I go one hundred percent goth during karaoke, which is its own kind of national security threat). But there was something to a song with literally zero political content whose entire lyrical ambition was “let’s dance, it’s later than you think.” We could use a few more songs like that. Besides, KC never rented out Madison Square Garden and shut down several blocks of Midtown Manhattan so his elitist friends could watch him get married. KC just wanted you to shake your booty. It was a simpler, more honest ask.
5. Italian Ice
Thirty-five cents, stolen fair and square from my father’s dresser, purchased from a man driving a truck that played what I would later discover were horror-movie theme songs slowed down to an eerie, haunting tempo — served, without irony, to children — in a paper cup, with a wooden spoon useless for anything except turning your tongue the exact color of a crime scene. Who does not somehow miss a free wooden spoon?? No parent has ever objected to Italian ice on health grounds, because it announced its own worthlessness right there in the name. It’s flavored ice, a cup of colored frozen sugar water. That’s the whole pitch. And we loved it. We loved it because that was the whole pitch. Also, brain freeze…
4. Walter Cronkite
I’d take an AI Walter Cronkite over half of what currently reads the news to us, and I say that as someone who has spent a genuinely alarming number of hours thinking about what AI should and shouldn’t be allowed to do. The man’s entire brand was no reaction: “I will tell you the thing, and then I will get out of the way.” We somehow inverted that completely. Now the reaction is the only thing, and the news is optional. Give me the guy who signed off with “that’s the way it is” and let me decide how I feel about it, which was, it turns out, a wildly radical business model. We should try it again sometime.
(A brief aside for Gerald Ford, who does not make the list but deserves the mention: a man who pardoned his predecessor, survived two assassination attempts in seventeen days, and still somehow projected the energy of a guy who just wants everyone to stop yelling at the Thanksgiving table. Gerry, we hardly knew ye. You had one job — ride the Bicentennial wave into a second term — and Jimmy Carter’s smile took it from you. I remain unreasonably upset about this on your behalf.)
3. Paul Harvey
For you kids under 40 who don’t remember: there was a man who, every single day, at noon, on the radio, in a voice that sounded like parking lot gravel, would tell you a story. Not a headline. Not a hot take. A story — some odd little historical footnote, some forgotten figure, some strange coincidence buried in the fine print of American life — and he’d build it, piece by piece, patiently, the way you’d walk someone through a card trick, right up until the final beat, when he’d pause just long enough for you to lean toward the dashboard, and deliver the twist you never saw coming: “And now you know... the rest of the story.” Then he’d say “Paul Harvey, good day” and be gone, having asked nothing of you except your attention for three and a half minutes. Nobody yelled. Nobody was owned.
2. Cracker Jack Surprises
A box of candied popcorn that, instead of simply being candied popcorn, contained a prize — a tiny plastic diver, a temporary tattoo, and once, memorably, a whistle that summoned every dog within a four-block radius. The prize was almost always worthless, which didn’t matter in the slightest. We were promised a surprise, and America, whatever else is currently true about us, has never stopped believing in the surprise. Somebody at Frito-Lay corporate should genuinely be thinking about what a “Cracker Jack surprise” looks like for grown-ups in 2026, because I would pay real money — I want to stress, actual currency — to reintroduce mild, harmless, low-stakes delight into my adult life on a predictable schedule. Open box. Find toy. Feel, for four seconds, that the universe has my back. Is that so much to ask.
1. Jell-O Salad
I’ve already made the full case for this — the lime cabbage horror, the sour cream cranberry ambush, the mayonnaise-as-garnish of it all — so I won’t re-litigate a war I’ve already won. I’ll just say this: if you can get a table of skeptical, college-educated, 401(k)-having adults to go back for seconds of vegetables suspended in gelatin, purely on the strength of nostalgia, you’ve located something more powerful than any campaign message currently in circulation. We didn’t need policy. We needed Perfection Salad.
None of this fixes anything, obviously. Nobody’s changing their vote because I made a case for Italian ice. But for about six and a half minutes, you weren’t thinking about the news. You were thinking about a wooden spoon, a temporary tattoo, or a man in a star-spangled jumpsuit breaking his pelvis for your amusement. That’s not nothing. In this political moment, that might be the whole ballgame.
I love this country. I love the people who’ve made it, against fairly long odds, the best place I know to build a life. Happy 250th, everybody. Now go check your dresser for a Bicentennial drummer boy quarter.
Also… Mood Ring!
(That one’s for my sister, so she hits “like”)