I have twice seen my husband’s life flash before his eyes. The first was years ago when a boozed but otherwise benevolent man accidentally used my head as a table at Notting Hill Carnival, and Luke chivalrously leapt to my aid amid the pandemonium. The second was this July, when we both cowered in fear as two F-35s soared above our heads—puncturing the hot DC air with a deafening sonic boom.
I suppose there are some people who aren’t bothered by the noise. Patriots who live near naval air bases talk about the planes with pride. Donald Trump loves them so much he’s had them do flyovers during his appearances for the 250th anniversary celebrations for the Independence of the United States, like a morbid trumpet section from the skies. I was dumbstruck by the roar that followed the jets with about a second’s delay. Like lightning, the sight of the supersonic fighter jet gives you just enough time to jam your fingers into your ears and scrunch your eyelids shut before its thunder comes. Except I’ve never been scared of thunder.
The same type of lethal fighter jet that’s bombed civilians in places like Gaza and Iran is just one of the bizarre spectacles I saw in DC last week to honour 250 years of “freedom”. One morning I arrived in an office where I was due to deliver training in vertical video, and found red and blue half-moon doilies decorating the walls and a blow-up bald eagle hanging from the ceiling. When I switched the news on in my hotel room, every station obsessed over the blooming green algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which Trump had tried to turn US blue ahead of the celebrations. When I headed out to see it for myself, more than a dozen men in hazmat suits were guzzling the algae down with weird water hoovers. Where was it all going? Do algae compost heaps exist?
Hoovering algae is of course futile, because to actually get rid of it, you need to remove the conditions which allowed the algae to grow in the first place. Algae loves warm, calm water fed by park runoff or urban storms—exactly the kind that sparkles with the reflection of the Washington Monument. I resisted every urge to dip my hand in and instead chaperoned an addled duckling back to its mother. I wondered what birds thought of the deathly roar of an F-35.
My trip to DC was a brief respite in my book tour schedule, which has otherwise sent me all around the UK speaking about the subject of languages that are under threat of suppression or disappearance. Having spent some time interviewing members of the Karuk Nation in northern California, who have fewer than 20 speakers left of their ancestral language, I couldn’t help but think about all the things the US might be spending taxpayer money on, other than F-35 flyovers or algal bloom hoovers. Alongside corporate donations, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year allocated $150m to be spent on America’s 250th anniversary of ridding themselves of a coloniser. In this case, of course, the colonisers still stuck around.
When researching my book, I came across a 2019 article from High County News, a midwest media nonprofit, which said that up until 2018, “the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization” had reached about $17.4m. This pales in significance to the $2bn in today’s money that the US has spent over the years on linguicide, for example through establishing residential schools which, among other things, forced children to drop indigenous languages and learn English. “In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one,” the journalist wrote.
This almost changed. The Biden administration released a 10-year national plan to address “the United States government’s role in the loss of Native languages across the continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii.” It called for a $16.7bn investment into revitalisation programmes, which would have come as good news to all the federally recognised tribes who have often had to rely on a competitive grant system, hoping for the best that their community made the cut. But very shortly afterwards, the administration came to a close, and the second Trump era began. He did have some big language goals—they just involved declaring English the sole official language of the US, renaming the mountain Denali (from the native Alaskan Koyukon language) to Mount McKinley and calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The Biden-era plan for indigenous languages remains seemingly ignored, its billion-dollar investment unplaced.
I’m sure the F-35s were supposed to symbolise glory, but as the jets roared and the algae bloomed, I didn’t feel it. Once the terror abated, I considered how selective the memory of America’s president can be, when he has millions of dollars at his disposal.
