In 1976, the US celebrated the 200th year since it squirmed out from under the thumb of its colonial master and set course to become the world’s richest and most successful republic.
One of the exhibits of that now achingly nostalgic time was the Freedom Train that travelled the land and showed people their history, or so the fantasy goes.
The train’s 10 display cars were stuffed with American treasures, including George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, the original document of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (in which France sold a vast chunk of the country to the new republic), Jesse Owens’s gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Martin Luther King’s robes, an actual moon rock, and Judy Garland’s dress from The Wizard of Oz.
In 1976, the Richland Center Girl Scouts Troop 208 presented a laughing President Gerald Ford with a copy of the Declaration of Independence made from alphabet noodles (it is still on display in his presidential library).
But we’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.
38% of adult Americans do not believe the country will exist 250 years from now
In 2026, the current administration held an Ultimate Fighting Championship in an arena on the White House lawns, during which one fighter made a point of insulting Michelle Obama, 10 years after she last left the building.
Rome had bread and circuses too.
Maybe the organisers of the 1976 train did the US the injury that has brought it to the point where a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll determined that 38% of adult Americans do not believe the country will exist 250 years from now.
Maybe those railroad cars should also have carried other artefacts of the American story — copies of Jim Crow laws, cannon-shredded uniforms of Civil War dead, worthless land treaties, photographs of a Vietnamese village called My Lai, a 1942 map of an internment camp for US-Japanese, desiccated wheat from the Nebraska dust bowl circa 1934 …
Not so much a looking glass then, but a mirror.
