Sunday, April 19

The Reichstag building had been scrubbed, renovated, crowned with a glass dome. The smell was of new carpet, fresh paint, and polished wood. On April 19, 1999, the deputies filed in. The sound was a low murmur of conversation, the shuffle of papers, the click of heels on stone that had known other boots. The chamber was modern, airy, democratic in its new design. But the walls, stripped back to their original brick in places, still bore the scars of Red Army graffiti from 1945. The ghosts were not exorcised; they were put on display.

The move from Bonn was not merely logistical. It was existential. Bonn was provisional, a post-war promise to be temporary. Berlin was historical, layered, heavy. To sit in Berlin was to accept the full narrative—the imperial ambition, the Weimar fragility, the Nazi horror, the Cold War division. It was to legislate in a building that had burned, been besieged, and lain fallow for decades. The debate that day was procedural. The significance was in the act of sitting down. Each deputy felt the chill of the stone, saw the preserved Cyrillic scrawls in their peripheral vision. They were not just moving a government. They were attempting to write a new chapter in a very old, and very fraught, book. The precision of the return—the specific date, the voted-upon motion—was a controlled attempt to master a chaotic history. It was an agreement to work within the haunted house.

The air in the Tracey Ullman Show studio smelled of hairspray and stage dust. It was late. A short, crude animation flickered onto a monitor during a bumper segment. The lines were shaky, the colors garish. A family of four—yellow, spiky-haired, blue-haired, and a pacifier—stood in their living room. The mother, Marge, had a towering blue beehive hairdo that seemed to defy physics. The father, Homer, was a bald cannonball of a man in a white shirt. “Good night,” they said in unison, their voices scratchy on the studio speakers. Then the boy, Bart, added a sly, “No *way*, man!” before being yanked offscreen by his father’s hand on his neck. It was over in thirty seconds.

There was no applause. It was filler. The animators, Matt Groening and his small team, had worked frantically, the paper cells piling up. The movement was jerky, the aesthetic purposefully ugly against the slick variety-show backdrop. You could see the pencil lines. To the crew, it was just another weird bit. But in that jerky motion, in that defiant “No *way*, man,” lived a seed of profound dissonance. This wasn’t the smoothed-over, moral-family cartoon of the past. This was something prickly, sarcastic, and recognizably exhausted. The couch they stood on was a platform for a new kind of domestic reality—one of simmering frustration, dumb love, and a kid who talked back. No one in the room that night felt they were watching history. They were just watching the clock, waiting to go home, while something raw and brilliantly strange blinked into existence on a screen.

Most people know Waco. Few remember the siege that happened eight years earlier, and 350 miles to the east. The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) was not a cult in the traditional sense. It was a paramilitary ministry preparing for a racial holy war. Their compound in rural Arkansas wasn’t a communal home; it was a fortress. They had a machine shop, a medical clinic, and an armory. They had built their own armored vehicle, a truck dubbed “The Thing.” They stockpiled cyanide, intending to poison urban water supplies. They possessed, according to later inventories, 150 firearms and 30 improvised grenades.

The ATF and FBI moved in on April 19, 1985—a date that would later become grimly symbolic. The agents established a perimeter. Helicopters thumped overhead. The CSA members, believing themselves to be soldiers in the coming End Times, aimed their rifles from fortified positions. For two days, negotiators spoke through bullhorns across the muddy fields. The demand was surrender. The fear was a bloodbath. On the second day, the group’s leader, James Ellison, agreed to give up. The standoff ended without a shot fired by the authorities. The surprise was not the ideology, which was vile but documented. It was the scale and sophistication of the separatist infrastructure, a fully realized shadow state hidden in the Ozarks, waiting for a war that only its inhabitants believed was imminent. It was a dry run for federal agencies, and a dark template for the radical right.

What does a nation choose to sing about itself? For decades, Australia used ‘God Save the Queen.’ Then, in a 1977 plebiscite, the public was asked. ‘Advance Australia Fair,’ a 19th-century patriotic song, won. But it wasn’t official. It existed in a bureaucratic limbo for seven years. The announcement on April 19, 1984, by Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen, was a formality. A proclamation. The anthem was now the anthem. The colors, green and gold, were now the colors.

But within that administrative act lies a quiet, persistent question of identity. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ speaks of a ‘young and free’ nation with ‘golden soil’ and ‘wealth for toil.’ It is forward-looking, secular, and geographically specific. To choose it was to choose a symbol of independent, post-colonial self-definition, however awkward the melody. The selection of green and gold—the colors of the wattle blossom—over the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack was a complementary gesture. It was a shift from imperial inheritance to natural emblem.

This was not a revolution. It caused little stir. Yet, in the calm language of proclamations, a country was slowly, deliberately, editing its own symbolism. It was choosing the gum tree over the oak, a continent’s palette over an empire’s flag. The event asks what we do with the symbols we inherit, and how we decide, through votes and paperwork, to quietly replace them with ones we feel, however imperfectly, are ours.