It’s a cruel quirk of fate, or maybe just a tragic irony, that we are celebrating America’s semiquincentennial during one of the most surreal periods in American history. We’ve certainly been through tougher economic times, and our latest war in the Middle East is not as ambitious as even the ones we waged earlier in this century. But I don’t think things have ever been as downright strange on both a domestic and global level as they are in the era of Donald Trump. Celebrating the Declaration of Independence under these circumstances is downright phantasmagoric.
Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t feel like any kind of celebration as much as an otherworldly requiem for a country that no longer exists.
