They Put a Racetrack on the National Mall

La fiesta y la conversación difícil.

The party and the difficult conversation.

That's exactly it.

And America is having both right now.

The race on the Mall is unambiguously festive.

Hundreds of thousands of people, spectacle, noise, Jeff Gordon coming out of retirement.

But underneath it, there's a real reckoning happening about what 250 years actually adds up to.

Fletcher, ¿tú sientes orgullo por tu país hoy?

Fletcher, do you feel pride for your country today?

That's a harder question than it sounds coming from you.

Honestly?

Yes.

Not an uncritical pride.

I've spent too many years covering what happens when American foreign policy goes wrong to feel anything uncritical about it.

But the founding documents, the idea that a bunch of colonial subjects sat down and wrote a philosophical argument for why power derives from the people, that still moves me.

Eso es bonito.

That's beautiful.

Pero muchos de esos hombres tenían esclavos.

But many of those men owned slaves.

They did.

Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" and owned over 600 people across his lifetime.

That contradiction is not a footnote.

It's load-bearing.

And the argument America has been having for 250 years is basically: do we live up to the words, or do we acknowledge the words were always for some people and not others?

Todos los países tienen esa conversación.

Every country has that conversation.

España también.

Spain too.

Tell me about that.

Because I know Spain has struggled with how to publicly mark its own history, particularly Franco.

You don't exactly see big official celebrations of 1975 in Madrid.

No.

No.

La transición a la democracia es importante para España.

The transition to democracy is important for Spain.

Pero no es fácil de celebrar.

But it's not easy to celebrate.

Because too many people are still alive who remember it from different sides.

That's the thing about 250 years.

The Civil War ended 160 years ago, and it still casts a shadow over American politics.

But 250 years gives you enough distance, theoretically, to look back with some perspective.

Theoretically.

¿Y una carrera de coches ayuda con esa perspectiva?

And a car race helps with that perspective?

Look, this is the part I find genuinely fascinating.

Because the choice of motorsport is not random.

Cars are deeply American.

The interstate highway system, Route 66, the muscle car, the drive-in movie, the road trip as a form of spiritual experience.

Putting a race on the National Mall is a cultural statement whether they meant it to be or not.

En España, para una celebración grande, ponemos música, comida, gente en la calle.

In Spain, for a big celebration, we have music, food, people in the street.

Right, and that difference is revealing.

Spanish national celebrations tend to be about communal gathering, food, shared public space.

American ones tend toward performance and spectacle.

The Super Bowl halftime show as civic ritual.

Fireworks that cost more than some countries' annual budgets.

Now race cars on the Mall.

Pero el espectáculo también une a las personas.

But spectacle also brings people together.

No es malo.

It's not bad.

Fair point, and I accept it.

There's something real about hundreds of thousands of people standing in the same place watching the same thing, regardless of what that thing is.

Collective experience is how national identity gets renewed.

It's not just pomp.

It does actual work.

Exacto.

Exactly.

La gente necesita momentos juntos.

People need moments together.

Eso es muy humano.

That's very human.

And 250 is a genuinely rare number.

Britain's been around long enough that they don't really track it the same way.

France had its bicentennial in '89.

But 250 hits differently because America is still young enough to feel the founding generation as almost reachable.

My grandmother was born 150 years after 1776.

You can close that gap in three lifetimes.

Tres generaciones.

Three generations.

Eso es poco tiempo para un país.

That's a short time for a country.

It's nothing.

Rome lasted a thousand years.

China has been continuous, in various forms, for millennia.

America at 250 is, in civilizational terms, barely out of adolescence.

And maybe that's why these anniversaries hit so hard.

There's still a sense that the project is unfinished.

That it could still go either way.

Eso es un poco preocupante, Fletcher.

That's a little worrying, Fletcher.

It keeps me up some nights, I'll be honest.

But there's something clarifying about a moment like this one.

Whatever you think of the current political situation, when you put 300,000 people on the National Mall and they're watching something together, something holds.

That shared physical presence means something.

Y Jeff Gordon gana.

And Jeff Gordon wins.

Un hombre mayor.

An older man.

Eso también es un símbolo, ¿no?

That's also a symbol, isn't it?

You know what, I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're right.

Jeff Gordon at 54, coming out of a long retirement to race on the most symbolically loaded stretch of grass in the country, and winning.

There's a story there about experience, about legacy, about the things that don't go away even when you think they have.

I'm possibly reading too much into it.

No, yo creo que la gente necesita esas historias.

No, I think people need those stories.

Las historias de personas reales.

Stories about real people.

That's actually what struck me about the coverage.

The big anniversary events can become abstract very quickly.

Doscientos cincuenta años.

The number is too large to feel.

But Jeff Gordon, a face people recognize, someone they watched race in their living rooms twenty years ago, coming back and winning on the National Mall, that's a thing you can hold in your hands.

Oye, ¿tú dices 'doscientos cincuenta años' en español?

Hey, you said 'doscientos cincuenta años' in Spanish?

Bien.

Well done.

I did.

And I'm going to count that as a win before you check my pronunciation.

Está bien, está bien.

It's fine, it's fine.

Pero hay una cosa.

But there's one thing.

Tú dices 'años'.

You say 'años'.

Eso es correcto.

That's correct.

Pero también decimos 'cumplir años'.

But we also say 'cumplir años'.

Cumplir años.

That's the verb for turning an age, right?

Like a birthday.

Mi hija cumple veinte años.

My daughter turns twenty.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Y también: 'Estados Unidos cumple doscientos cincuenta años.' Es más natural.

And also: 'The United States turns 250 years old.' It's more natural.

So cumplir carries the sense of completing something, fulfilling a number.

Which is actually a more interesting frame than just saying 'is 250 years old.' It implies reaching, arriving at.

The country has fulfilled 250 years.

There's something almost aspirational in the construction.

Sí.

Yes.

'Cumplir' viene de 'completar'.

'Cumplir' comes from 'to complete'.

Completar el tiempo.

To complete the time.

Es bonito, ¿no?

It's beautiful, isn't it?

It really is.

América cumple doscientos cincuenta años.

That's a sentence with some weight to it.

Far better than what I'd come up with on my own, which would probably involve telling the waiter I'm 250 years pregnant.

Siempre con el 'embarazado'.

Always with the 'embarazado'.

No aprendes nada, Fletcher.

You never learn anything, Fletcher.