America turned 250 years old this Fourth of July weekend, and the official celebrations included a UFC event, a state fair with a broken ferris wheel, and what witnesses described as a pool full of green slop. Millions of dollars. That's what we spent. A pool of green slop.
The Birthday Party Nobody Asked For
Writing in The Guardian, Dave Schilling laid out the full horror of what the United States put together to mark a quarter millennium of existence. There was the UFC event. There was a poorly attended state fair. There was the PragerU Freedom Truck, presumably driving around making things worse. And somehow, somewhere, there was a pool of green slop that apparently passed muster as a patriotic attraction.
For context: this is a country that put a man on the moon. A country that invented jazz, the internet, and the cheeseburger. And for its 250th birthday, it handed the mic to a malfunctioning carnival ride and a cage fight.
Schilling, to his credit, does not mince words about any of this. He compares the whole enterprise unfavorably to a $50 Roblox gift card and a hug, which tracks. At least a Roblox gift card works when you try to use it.
What We Could Have Done Instead
Schilling's piece is nominally an op-ed about birthday grumpiness, but it doubles as a genuinely sharp indictment of how the country chooses to celebrate itself versus how it could. His proposed gifts to the nation are, in ascending order of ambition: abolish the electoral college, make Puerto Rico a state, and force HBO to produce a ninth season of Game of Thrones via AI.
The electoral college bit lands harder than it probably should. As Schilling points out in The Guardian, the system handed Donald Trump the presidency in 2016 despite his losing the popular vote, which is a fact that gets lost in the noise but deserves to just sit there quietly for a moment. He frames it as a math problem, which is somehow the funniest and most accurate framing possible. Every four years, a country of 340 million people has to do electoral vote arithmetic at midnight like they're sweating a World Cup tiebreaker.
On Puerto Rico, Schilling is blunt: the US controls 14 territories with people living in them, Puerto Rico is largely self-governing and culturally distinct, and so is Texas, and we let Texas be a state. Hard to argue with that one.
The Green Slop Problem Is Real
Look, the optics here are not subtle. The semiquincentennial, as the official planners have been calling it, was meant to be a grand national moment. The kind of thing you'd read about in history books. The kind of event that crystallizes what a country stands for at a given moment in time.
And what this one crystallized, according to Schilling's accounting in The Guardian, is a fenced-off national monument, a fair with no attendees, and apparently some kind of verdant aquatic disaster. The ferris wheel did not work correctly. These are facts.
It is not unfair to ask what a quarter billion dollars' worth of celebration planning actually produced here. Because from the outside, it produced a UFC card and vibes that Schilling charitably describes as "moribund."
The AI Game of Thrones Pitch Deserves Serious Consideration
Here is the thing about Schilling's Game of Thrones proposal: he knows it's insane, and he says so, and he's still right that it would be more satisfying than what we got. He writes in The Guardian that an AI-generated season nine would feature terrible dialogue, clichéd fan service, extra fingers on half the characters, and soulless dead eyes, and it would signal the inevitable end of human creativity.
And yet. And yet, he argues, it would at least produce something with the billions poured into artificial intelligence. Put that way, it's almost a reasonable infrastructure argument.
The broader joke here is that America keeps making enormous bets on things that don't deliver what they promised, whether that's AI, the electoral college, or a national birthday party. The returns are poor. The ferris wheel is broken. The pool is inexplicably green.
Schilling's Plan for the Actual Evening
After laying out his alternative vision for the nation, Schilling in The Guardian describes how he personally intends to mark the occasion: a 30-pack of beer, locked door, Theo Von podcasts, and a Kalshi bet that Donald Trump dances to YMCA at the end of his speech. He frames this as hiding, irrational optimism, and terrible financial decisions, and then says flatly: that's America.
That is, genuinely, a tighter definition of the American condition than anything produced by the official 250th anniversary planning committee. It took one sentence. Nobody needed a ferris wheel for that.
He is 42, he points out, and America is 250, and neither of them is aging particularly gracefully. The difference is that America has more money to spend on denial.
The Dingo Take
There is something almost poetically appropriate about the United States marking 250 years of existence with a broken carnival ride, an underpopulated state fair, and a pool of what we can only hope was decorative slime. This is a country that has spent the last decade conducting a very public experiment in what happens when you stop maintaining basic democratic infrastructure, and the birthday party looks exactly like the thing it is celebrating.
Schilling's piece in The Guardian is funny, but it is funny the way a diagnosis is funny when the doctor delivers it with a deadpan expression. The electoral college math bit, the Puerto Rico point, the AI Game of Thrones gambit: all of it is absurdist, and none of it is wrong. We are a country that could do extraordinary things and has repeatedly chosen the malfunctioning ferris wheel option instead. Two hundred and fifty years in, that is the bit.
The part that sticks is the ending. Hiding, irrational optimism, and terrible financial decisions. Someone put that on the commemorative coin. It is more honest than anything on the actual commemorative coin, and it took a birthday grump writing in a British newspaper to say it out loud. Happy birthday, America. The pool is green. The wheel does not spin. At least the UFC event happened.
