Americana Leaves NoVa
What's On My Mind
In 2019, I took to Front Porch Republic to mount a defense of my hometown of Herndon, Virginia. Yes, Herndon is a bedroom community of Washington, DC, but it need not be condemned to the fate of countless suburbs that lack any defining communal characteristics. I argued then that Herndon should continue to become a “Somewhere” suburb, a nod to David Goodhart’s book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. I wrote that Herndon’s “reemerging historic core and civic events reflect, to borrow from Robert Nisbet, a quest for community.”
Well, we got news this week that Herndon seems determined to follow the exact opposite path, and become yet another “Anywhere” collection of bedrooms and garages. After 40 years, the most important of those civic events—the Herndon Festival—was permanently cancelled this week.
The Herndon Festival was a fixture of the community, a defining start to summer for multiple generations of Herndon natives, and an important element of small town Americana in an increasingly culturally confused region. Over the past decade or so, town leadership has made decisions more in line with the combination of upwardly mobile commuters and downwardly mobile immigrants who have overtaken the town and squeezed out the lower-middle class—and which have in turn made the festival unviable.
That reemerging historic core played host to the festival’s many booths and carnival rides. It was slated to be redeveloped in 2018, prompting the festival to move to a bland office park in 2019. Predictably, it flopped. Volunteers became hard to come by once it was hosted in a suburban parking lot—and amidst the town’s aforementioned socioeconomic and demographic shifts. Covid cancellations simply accelerated a trend already in motion.
Regular readers of TAC may know that I’m in the midst of moving from my hometown. The cancellation of the Herndon Festival is just the latest reminder to me that Herndon is not the same place it was growing up. It also should remind all of us to cherish the local customs and events that make the places we live communities. They’re needed now more than ever.
From the Pod
The podcast crew checked in on the latest in Israel this week, amidst reports that the Biden administration is pausing rifle sales amidst fears they’ll end up in the hands of West Bank settlers targeting their Palestinian neighbors. The story just illustrates the messiness of that war.
But I want to point readers to our third segment. Shane Dawson is apparently a prominent YouTube star, who made headlines this week by posting that he and his “husband” purchased twin baby boys by way of renting a woman’s womb. Surrogacy is always a moral abomination, and should be banned. But the Dawson case is noteworthy because he has a history of making light of pedophilia. There’s no chance he’d pass a screening for adoption. Why do we allow him to manufacture and purchase baby boys? My podcast co-hosts had some good strategies for tackling the surrogacy issue head-on.
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