Dear America — Happy F*****g Birthday: Christopher Hooks on an Exhausted United States at 250

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. It's an old question on the show, how to write about America. It's such a strange place that it really requires a kind of hyper-realistic framing. A few weeks ago, we had the novelist Ben Fountain on. He has a new novel out. It's an absurdist novel about contemporary America called Rasputin Swims, The Potomac, which imagines Washington, DC as a totally absurd place. Although, of course, if one was trying to imagine Trump's Washington, DC a few years ago, most people wouldn't have believed it. But in spite of Fountain's efforts, fictional efforts, there is a real Washington, DC. And that's what we're going to talk about today. The cover of the venerable Harper's Magazine has a rather vulgar article, shall we say, on the cover or a vulgarly entitled article, although the article itself isn't very vulgar. It's called Happy Fucking Birthday, An Exhausted America Turns Two Hundred and Fifty. And it's by my guest, Christopher Hooks, not Hicks, Hooks. Chris, Happy Two Hundred and Fiftieth.

**Christopher Hooks** (1:57)
Well, right back to you. Maybe your country can come back and swallow mine up again.

**Andrew Keen** (2:04)
Yeah, unfortunately, it's no longer my country.
I'm in it with you. Chris, I'm not sure if you've had a chance to see the Fountain novel about Rasputin swimming, the Potomac. But how much of a struggle is it to write a realistic journalistic piece about America in July 2026?

**Christopher Hooks** (2:34)
Oh, well, it's difficult. As you say, you need a kind of satirical or surreal edge, I think, to get at what it feels to live in America right now.
At the same time, the thing that we're writing about, Donald Trump's America, is at this point 10 years old, and it can feel like there's not that much new to say about that either. It's living the same cycle of pathologies over and over again. So it's difficult. I think the tension that I was working through in this piece was sort of how to try to make myself feel something new about America or to work through the difficult feelings I've had about it over the last decade or so, which I know a lot of Americans are struggling to do right now, have been struggling to do.

**Andrew Keen** (3:34)
Tell me about the title. I know your day job is with a Texas magazine. You divide your time between Austin and Brooklyn, New York.
But the Texas magazine that you write for doesn't usually use swear words in its titles. Who came up with that title? Happy Fucking Birthday.

**Christopher Hooks** (3:53)
Oh, that was my editor at Harper's. They came up with that. But it does sort of match, you know, how I feel. I thought it was, there's just a feeling of kind of exhaustion and resentment.
And resentment of kind of maybe sometimes maybe feeling a little bit foolish about still feeling attached to some idea of this country that seems like it's maybe not holding that strong or that healthy anymore.

**Andrew Keen** (4:25)
So you're putting it politely, you're allowed to swear, Chris, on this show. A couple of days ago, we did. We had a conversation with my old friend Peter Wehner.
He writes for The Atlantic and The New York Times. His most recent piece is The Apotheosis of Donald Trump. I don't want to turn this into just another conversation about Trump. But of course, that's my prelude to asking a Trump question. How much of this exhaustion is bound up with Trump in your view?

**Christopher Hooks** (4:56)
Well, of course, a lot of it. In an alternate world where Ted Cruz or DeSantis was president today, I imagine center and left of center people might be feeling conflicting feelings about the country, but there's unique indignity to the Trump era. With the UFC fight at the White House, there's a delight I think that he and his people have at taking the noses of liberals and rubbing it in his abuse of American symbols. I think part of what's embarrassing about feeling offense to that a little bit is that you have to admit that the symbols meant something to you in the first place. Maybe you feel a little foolish for doing so. Nobody likes to be fooled.
My father is in his 80s, he was a Republican for most of his life until 2016
I think he and I share this despite being politically different in many respects, still share this feeling of it's a humiliation. He wakes up and he has to deal with the fact that America is maybe not the thing he thought it was, and he feels embarrassed. I feel embarrassed.