The Republic of the Replica

There is something perfect about spending the US's 250th birthday standing in a three-hour line in blistering heat to see the Declaration of Independence.I had travelled down from New York to Washington for the parade and the fireworks.I could not miss the semi-quincentennial being celebrated in America's capital.

I wanted the whole patriotic circus: Ben Franklin costumes, George Washington wigs, MAGA hats, marching bands, overheated speeches, flags large enough to have their own weather systems and beneath all that noise, the real point—the strange, flawed, glorious idea that a people could declare themselves free and then spend two-and-a-half centuries with a chip on their shoulder, aiming to prove it.

I thought a nation as powerful as America and as talented at promotion could organise its own birthday party.And that it would be fun for this American-African dual citizen who hasn't celebrated July 4th in more than a decade.

File it in the category of great ideas on paper, like the all-you-can-eat prawn festival my fiancée took me to that time.

First, they cancelled the Independence Day parade because of the heat wave, with temperatures roasting the asphalt close to 40°C.They announced this at the last minute even though the weather was not a surprise.

Instead, I dragged my friend Saleema, who lives in DC, to the National Archives so we could spend the morning in air-conditioned bliss.

There, I was sure, I would find the Uncle Sams, the colonial drummers, the children in red, white and blue face paint, the brass bands, the sweaty founding fathers, the flag-waving grandmothers: the national civic theatre of liberation!

Indeed, the Archives website advertised a special July 4 celebration, with founding documents, family events and dressed-up Revolutionary War characters including Franklin, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson and James Forten, the teenage Revolutionary War privateer and prisoner of war who became one of America's first great black industrialists.

While we waited in line between families from New York and California, a man from Texas, also with his family, got upset about a passer-by mocking his son's MAGA hat and started chanting "I love Trump!"A chant others in line began to join in, until one of the Archives police officers told him to stop, somewhat rudely even though I didn't love his message either.

He and the New Yorker claimed she was biased, that an anti-Trump message would have been welcomed and when I asked her if that was true, she told me to get back in line.

This queue had become a mini-America: hundreds of strangers who agreed on wanting to see the same faded parchment and disagreed on almost everything the parchment was supposed to mean, sweating it out three feet apart, policed by someone with no stake in the argument and no patience left for it.

The National Archives is not usually like this.On an ordinary day in Washington, DC, you can walk in with minimal fuss, pass through security in a minute and find yourself staring at the document that helped launch one of the great political experiments of the modern world.

Or, as Saleema put it, "It's one of the more boring museums in the city."

More than one person compared the cluster f to waiting in line at Disneyland, which was a bit unfair to Disneyland, which at least knows it is, indeed prides itself on being, a fantasy.

The line was full of families, tourists, veterans, people with water bottles and people without enough water.Most of the people had clearly underestimated the heat, including me.There were patriots and sceptics, visitors and locals, non-believers and true believers—people who wanted to stand near history for a couple hours.

People had come to participate in something.Not all for the same reason and not with the same politics but with some version of the same longing: to feel, for a moment, inside the complicated collective achievement called America.

Once we finally got inside the Archives, we thought we had achieved something but to see the documents themselves was another hour's wait.

While in that second line, we heard a rumour that this Declaration was not the real document but a replica, with the original temporarily in the Oval Office, possibly for Trump's personal pleasure.

Was this true?Almost certainly not.The National Archives says the original Declaration lives there.

But that is not the point.The point is that, after hours of heat, confusion, barriers, patriotic pageantry and malfunction, the rumour felt emotionally plausible.

America had produced an anniversary so chaotic that even the Declaration of Independence began to feel like it might be fake.And the day was only just getting started.

The area around the Declaration was like a world-record-sized rugby scrum, with people jostling one another to get in position for a photo with history.

The good news was, the Bill of Rights seemed to be the real deal.And yet there was no shoving crowd around it, which again seemed to have a meta-meaning.Freedom is sexy.Rights, I guess not so much.

After retreating from the heat awhile, I set out alone to the Salute to America Celebration, a concert, speech by the president and fireworks held on the National Mall.There, I would surely find my circus.

But just as I arrived at the Smithsonian Metro stop, a National Guardsman announced an evacuation for severe thunderstorm warnings predicted days earlier, ignored until now.

The line into the venue ripped apart like an alien monster tearing loose a spinal cord.There were at least 150 000 people gathered there.President Donald Trump later claimed it was more than 400 000.

We took shelter wherever we could—the Department of Agriculture's grounds, a subway station—and after two hours in one line and three more in another, never made it in at all.

At least this failure was democratic.I stood next to people who'd held a spot on the Mall for six hours to get a good seat for Trump's speech and got sent out.

All of us "missed" the musical acts that didn't happen—Sammy Hagar, the remnants of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Lee Greenwood—which made last month's loud boycott by other acts ironic, since nobody played at all.

The presidential speech started as we jostled for position in amoebic chaos a quarter of a mile from the gates, apparently to a mostly empty Mall.

When the fireworks finally came, with the Washington Monument lit up with the vertical "FREEDOM 250" projected down each side, I had to watch them through the treetops while practically suspended between my neighbours' shoulders, all with the entry gates within a few powerful strides.

There were no ushers, no 250 celebration volunteers, just soldiers and police shouting instructions to step back.Has America become much like this day: tired, hot, confused, over-crowded and under-governed, increasingly unable to distinguish between a celebration and a security operation?

Inside the Archives, of course, the Declaration still says what it says, real or not.All men (sic) are created equal.Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.The people have the right to alter or abolish systems that become destructive.

But outside the building, the experience of the day raised a different question: What happens when a country still knows how to worship its founding words but no longer knows how to enact them in ordinary public life?

This is not just an American question.South Africans should be careful before we laugh too loudly.We know the distance between founding documents and lived reality.We have one of the most admired constitutions in the world and potholes that could qualify as national monuments.We talk out of one side of the mouth about freedom and human dignity and out the other demand to drive foreigners out.

Perhaps that is why America's July 4 mess felt so familiar to this double expatriate.

The United States often presents itself as exceptional.But on this weekend, it looked more like a warning from the future.

America is now a country where the myth and the machinery seem to be travelling in opposite directions.

The myth says: Freedom.

The machinery shouts: Back up!

The myth says: We the people.

The machinery says: This entrance is closed!

The myth says: Government by consent.

The machinery says: Keep moving!

The Declaration of Independence remains one of history's great acts of imagination.It turned grievance into principle.It gave rebellion a language large enough to outlive those who wrote it.

But imagination is not a museum object.It must be renewed in systems, habits and institutions.

Otherwise it becomes parchment under glass: admired, protected and increasingly unrelated to real life.

On July 4, I went looking for the birthday of a republic.

What I found was the Republic of the Replica: access without access, freedom behind barriers, ceremony without competence, patriotic spectacle without public welcome.

America did not fail to celebrate itself.

It celebrated itself perfectly.

Michael Brian Lee is the Mail & Guardian's US correspondent, currently based in New York.