This year marks my 50^th birthday, as it also does for the 3 million or so of my fellow Americans born in 1976. It is also — in case you missed the recent, erm, extravaganza on July 4 — the 250^th anniversary of the United States of America, such as it is. If 50 is (was?) the accepted point of midlife, what does that make 250 for this slab of land and its 340 million people? 

The idea of a ‘nation’ is, arguably, scarcely much older than the United States. Identity markers were historically more aligned with concepts such as kingdom, realm, city-state, or empire, not a ‘nation’. As the world moved from those forms of organisation into what today we would call a nation, thinkers puzzled over what it all meant. One classic example of this was French scholar Ernest Renan’s 1882 speech ‘What is a Nation?’.

I’m not going to use this space to write a long essay about what it means to be a nation (though I’d be more than happy to if someone would like to commission and pay me for it!), but I will put a few of his lines here for your consideration. Renan argued that places like France or England had become solid entities, like ‘the essential pieces of a checkerboard’, in that everyone had their square and they would no longer be conquered or fully ‘lost in one other’. In that sense, he concluded, ‘nations are something rather new in history.’

That being said, Renan argued there was a vital component to how these nations were forged: ‘Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is the reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality.’

Forgetting. Remembering. Imaging. It always comes back around to the stories we tell ourselves, how we tell them, and what we leave out. That is as much the case for a single person turning 50 as it is for a nation marking its 250^th. Renan spoke about forgetting in the context of languages or traditions eroding over time, pointing out that ‘no French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifal, or a Visigoth.’ Even in the US, it only takes a generation or two before immigrant languages fade, a process I am testament to (non parlo bene l’italiano).

The question of what a nation is and who belongs in it was reinvigorated a century later in the still-classic work Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, in which Anderson turned towards the Americas and South-East Asia in search of the nation and, by extension, the meaning of nationalism. If this all sounds a bit like PhD student talk down the pub, well, my introduction to these questions and thinkers dates from that era of my life. All the same, these are texts worth wrestling with, and both Renan and Anderson’s work have resonances today. 

Anderson’s basic thesis is that the definition of the nation is ‘an imagined political community’. By ‘imagined,’ Anderson meant that even people from small nations will never meet most of their fellow members and yet ‘in the minds of each live the image of their communion.’ And by ‘community,’ he argued that the ‘nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship.’ A comradeship that is deep enough for millions to die to defend it. Anderson theorised this well before the dawn of the internet era, and arguably that horizontal comradeship has not been replaced by internet verticals. If anything, there has been an intensification on the ground of nationalism, though this time stoked by the very virtual and no doubt highly imagined communities of the internet.

This seems a long way from the analog celebrations of the 200^th anniversary of the US and the birth of my bicentennial baby cohort. I consulted a copy of The News-Messenger, from Fremont, Ohio, to see how my birthplace celebrated that July 4th. The headline ‘Picnic, fireworks attract thousands’, summed up the day. There was a city picnic, games like a greased pig contest and sack races, and the obligatory fireworks display — though in this case, there were technical malfunctions and it was described by the organiser as ‘barely being adequate’. Being only a few months old at this point, I probably slept through the whole thing. 

However, given the city’s celebration and the wider national mood, the paper’s unsigned op-ed was quite circumspect, telling readers: 

However we feel about the bicentennial itself, the year-long exercise of observing it will have been wasted if, individually, we fail to pause and take stock of our national heritage and our potential; the past and future of our country and, indeed of ourselves and Americans.

Taking stock was not easy in the late 1970s. Indeed, to remember the bicentennial year with a rosy glow might require some forgetting. At times it is impossible to imagine how anyone actually survived the 1970s. If there wasn’t lead in the paint of your house, it was pumping out of the exhaust of your cars. The polyester clothes were a wearable fire hazard. There were grave insults to domestic style everywhere: avocado green bathroom suites, shagpile carpets, and forests of wood panelling in rec rooms throughout suburbia. It was the golden age of airplane hijackings, with TSA not even a gleam in the government’s eye. Smoking around children was still acceptable (see most of my childhood photos), and I’m fairly certain I never had a car seat.  

And yet, the world of 1976 feels both incredibly close because of its proximity to the formation of my earliest sensory and tactile memories, and impossible to imagine in this streamlined digital age. I’ve been ruminating a lot about the 1970s and its relation to where we are now, and was in this mindset on a recent trip to the US when I visited the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (home of Wal-Mart).

The main exhibition, which is still on until the end of July, is America 250: Common Threads, which has on display on a wide range of texts, artworks, and objects from 1776 to the present day, with a focus on how everyday goods could and continue to document and make sense of the nation’s past and its identity. There was George Washington themed-wallpaper, which might have looked jaunty in a 1970s bathroom, but I was more taken by the objects from the bicentennial, such as twee tea-towels (pictured below), patriotic cookie-cutters, and a decorative plate (left). They were a firm reminder that the 1970s remain, unfortunately, the absolutely nadir of collective good taste.

One of his works in this exhibition was Bring the Inside Out, painted in 1977. Like many of his pieces, there is a lot taking place on the canvas, but towards the bottom there is a depiction of people on a ship, with the following written underneath it: ‘pilgrims move in on everything and did not know about it / we seen the inside.’ Finster’s work is often Biblical in its references and also can be cryptic. Above the ship is a tree, where he had painted ‘This old tree holds the inside of the earth brought to the outside’ and elsewhere in this painting he writes — his works often have a lot of text — about how in January 1976 he ‘found my talent’ and began to paint. He never stopped. 

The museum tag attempted to make sense of what he was doing in the work, positing the idea that Finster’s use of ‘it’ represented a larger, more essential truth about the world. It also noted that Finster had reason to connect 1776 to 1976, the year he reached his own personal new lands. He found a nation of art within himself. 

Bring the inside out, he implores us in the title, perhaps telling us to live a life leading with our hearts. At time of great strife and division in the US, and onset of midlife among the Bicentennial babes, maybe putting heart before head will help all of us move with more grace and ease, and navigate whatever lies ahead in the next 50 years. 

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What I’m … reading 

I know, I know, it has won all the accolades and has the Oprah seal of approval, but Kin by Tayari Jones deserves every single one of them. Come for the story of two girls, best friends united by the fact they have missing or dead mothers, but stay for the absolutely poetic, evocative language. Most of my reading these days veers into non-fiction, and when I do dip into novels, they usually come up short for me, especially in terms of craft. Kin, however, is a masterclass in storytelling and exceptional writing. It also brings with it an examination of race and class, and the larger question of fate. It was a really compelling read, and it lingered in my mind long after I had finished it.

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