SUNDAY SCARIES: America's Brand Pillars

Yesterday, I visited LEGOLAND in Goshen, NY with my nephew and walked through all of America in miniature. It started with a soaring NYC, then D.C. and the Capitol, a singing Mt. Rushmore, Monument Valley, lots of Las Vegas, and even the Golden Gate Bridge, all of it in plastic brick and lit like a country on its best behavior. And America looks like the brand we expect it to be, provided you don't look too closely.

Every brand is built on a few load-bearing brand pillars: the handful of things that it stands for unequivocally. America is arguably the biggest brand in the world and it's had more than a few reputation issues recently. So today we look at its pillars and compare the patriotic ones, from lines we put on coins and posters, to the reality of how those same pillars survive when it's all in market.

1. Unity

Freedom 250 is the White House's extremely profitable birthday operation that's been muscling aside the actually bipartisan America250 it shares a name with, which was created 10 years earlier. Two birthday parties, both ostensibly based to celebrate and unify, and they couldn't be more different.

America250 is a group dedicated to bringing people together for service, pride in the states, and giving back to the country. Freedom 250 is dedicated to highlighting the white male founders who signed their names, the official merch, and the million-dollar donation that can get you a photo with Donald Trump.

By now, we've all read how the musicians who were booked at the Great American State Fair concert realized this spring that Freedom 250 was basically MAGA 250 and started declining their invitations. Martina McBride and Bret Michaels pulled out, saying they'd signed on for something nonpartisan that had turned out to be otherwise. The Commodores went, and C+C Music Factory. Watching a B-list lineup leave by the back door, the President called his previously hand-chosen performers “overpriced and boring”, and swapped in a rally with Lee Greenwood. (For the record, the million-dollar donation still buys you a photo with Trump.)

And then there's the most America of all: Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields festival, which lands in August with Bikini Kill to Chappell Roan to Stevie Nicks, an all-women lineup, every artist playing for free so the entire gate can go to the causes she'll put her name beside. A statement to remind us all about tickets that are priceless.

Takeaway: We want to be the country that gathers together for free, but we keep being sold the false division at a markup.

(Sources: NOTUS, Axios on the State Fair cancellation; The New York Times, Freedom 250; Rolling Stone, Daisy Chain Fields)

2. Welcoming

Given the single team representation, the FIFA World Cup is the most patriotic sporting event on earth, and yet with America playing the bouncer, eleven of the forty-eight qualifying nations couldn't get past the door, hitting visa-refusal rates north of forty percent. What should have been a story of resentment was instead a story of what genuinely peaceful and respectful joy could look like.

After Japan beat Tunisia, the fans stayed behind to bag the trash, (because you clean up when you're a guest in someone's house) and created a trend of good behavior that we never would have had. Iran was forced to base itself across the border in Tijuana and commute to the stadiums under travel restrictions. Even their anthem was booed at kickoff. Yet they left a handwritten note in the SoFi locker room thanking Los Angeles and wishing peace among all nations. Scotland's Tartan Army took Boston like it was 1775, put traffic cones on the head of Sam Adams, and then, because Providence had given them a city they could actually afford, wrote Hasbro Children's Hospital a check for ten thousand dollars.

Takeaway: We want to be the country that welcomes the world, but we let the visitors show us what that level of class can look like.

(Sources: Reuters on Japan in Monterrey; USA Today on Iran's locker-room note; The Boston Globe on the Tartan Army's donations)

3. Promise

For two hundred and fifty years the American promise on belonging was simply: if you're born here, you're a citizen, no further questions. The latin is Jus Soli, or right of soil, written into the Fourteenth Amendment to bury Dred Scott and reaffirmed by the Court in 1898. This week the Justices are expected to say whether that's still true, ruling on the order that would deny citizenship to as many as a quarter-million babies a year. [Hopefully Justice Roberts' skepticism of the Administration's arguments holds: “Well, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution.”]

While the soil question waits on the Court, a record number of Americans have gone looking for the opposite, the “right of blood” or jus Sanguinis. Applications to Ireland's foreign-birth register jumped sixty-three percent in a single year. Descent claims across Europe rose as much as five hundred percent and Italy got so crowded with Italian-Americans it reversed course and tightened the law to keep them out. The grandparents crossed an ocean to trade the old country for this one. The grandchildren are digging the old country back up to trade it the other way.

Takeaway: We want being born here to mean something, but, while we wait for the Supreme Court to decide what it means, some white Americans are starting to keep their grandmother from County Cork as a backup plan.

(Sources: SCOTUSblog on Trump v. Barbara; the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs' Foreign Births Register figures; Newsweek on the citizenship-by-descent surge)

4. Greatness

All evidence to the contrary, the official answer to what America looks like was not supposed to be LEGOLAND in Goshen, NY. The vision of the current administration was supposed to be the National Garden of American Heroes: two hundred and fifty statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived, unveiled for the two hundred and fiftieth.

It is funded to the tune of forty million dollars, paid for in part by money stripped from the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Which is another way of saying that it defunds hundreds of living, working artists in order to create bronze gift-shop statues.

As of this month, it's unlikely a single statue will be standing in time. The deadline has slipped to sometime in the President's term, and they're still arguing over whether the thing belongs in the Black Hills or on the Potomac. One arts-society president, reaching for encouragement, managed only that “no one wants an outdoor Madame Tussauds museum.”

So the grand monument is, for now, an empty lot. And the most complete America you can walk through this weekend is the one I found in Goshen, holding very still, made of plastic.

Takeaway: We want to be a nation of visual monuments, but we defunded the living artists and called the “TBD” a tribute.

(Sources: CNN, The Washington Post: Garden of American Heroes timeline and funding; The Hill: West Potomac Park site)

This Week's Red Thread: Contradictory Brand Standards

Two hundred and fifty years ago today on June 28, 1776, Thomas Jefferson handed his draft to the Continental Congress.

The original pitch deck. And the stakeholders did what stakeholders do to a pitch deck.

Congress made eighty-six changes, by John Adams's own count, and they cut more than a quarter of it.

The line they killed was ironically Jefferson's hundred-and-sixty-eight-word passage damning the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself.” (It was done to keep key stakeholders, South Carolina and Georgia, happy).

The final founding text was an edited draft, signed by fifty-six men, a third of whom enslaved people. Both brave and morally compromised in the same breath.

We call that the original sin. It is. But the sin runs past slavery, into the method that produced it. When you build a purpose by committee, every faction writes its own needs into the founding before the ink is dry, and the bravest line is the first thing offered up when the coalition needs something to trade.

What you get is a compromise poured into the shape of a pillar. Every value arrives pre-split, holding two meanings at once, because two meanings were the price of the signatures.

So we were assembled, by design, as a tradeoff of evils, and a country built from tradeoffs argues with itself forever, just like the four signals above, because the argument is the thing holding it up.

The deck is just the deck. America's brand standards are lived by all of us, every day.

We are the key stakeholders and we cannot resign ourselves to being jaded consumers who walk down the aisle and stare at a grotesque new package on a legacy brand we used to love and just shrug and say, “Oh, that's too bad. I used to love America.”

— NB