The Great American State Fair

 

It may seem trivial to many, but I am taken by Trump’s lately announced plan to hold a Great American State Fair in Iowa, and to inaugurate a Garden of American Heroes. I wish Canada would do something similar.

It is a great idea politically: a promised party for Iowa, where the first caucuses are held. Trump is brilliant to tie it in to Field of Dreams, itself a celebration of American culture, even though written by a Canadian. “If we build it, they will come.”

But it is also a great idea for America. America needs such a tonic, after the hard years of pandemic, lockdown, inflation, and ongoing social division. There is a time to hold a party, and this is a time that America needs a party. Such a party can be magnificent for overall morale, as Expo 67 was to Canada. It can give a permanent boost to the culture. Think of the Eiffel Tower, built for the Paris World Exposition of 1889.

Trump is wise too to make it purely American, not a world’s fair. There is not time enough to organize a world’s fair. And this suits Trump’s message: America First. Moreover, in this era of globalism and multiculturalism, American culture has been neglected. The culture of corn dogs and beer and baseball and marching bands that a state fair evokes. More globalism is not the present need.

The Garden of American Heroes, in turn, is an ideal antidote to the current mad fever of tearing down statues. Besides being a vast art installation in itself, such a statuary garden can be a permanent boost to the culture, like Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Young Americans can aspire to one day be remembered her, alongside Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, Stephen Foster, Tina Turner, and the like.

The danger is that selection will fall under the evil penumbra of wokism: that those selected will not be the genuine heroes, but selected for skin colour, sex, or some irrelevant trait over which they had no control. The best way to avoid this, it seems to me, is to have selection by popular vote. Which is, after all, most fitting in the world’s great democracy.

I want the same for Canada.