Hutzell: I was a Buycentennial kid. This semiquincentennial is so much worse.

Fifty years ago, I stood on the Ocean City Convention Center stage, ready to collect my high school diploma and get out of town.

The Stephen Decatur High School Class of 1976 was resplendent in red, white or blue robes, topped with those kooky mortarboards you’re not supposed to fling like a square Frisbee.

We were the bicentennial graduates, lined up in American flag colors weeks before the nation celebrated the 200th year of its founding.

The cultural moment was so over-the-top with commercial stunts, kitsch and merch that wags and academics dubbed it the Buycentennial.

Baltimore’s 68,000-pound bicentennial birthday cake rotted in the harbor, unappreciated except by rats after a thunderstorm washed away the icing. “Highly collectible” Liberty Bell ashtrays were a sign of our oblivious tastes.

The excitement was so contrived, so unsupported by a cynical post-Vietnam and Watergate era, that the Annapolis committee ran out of money long before July Fourth, 1976.

I look at this year’s 250th sequel and can’t help but judge it, well, worse.

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of people’s big American hearts are beating in the right place, hosting events around the nation.

Sail250 in Baltimore, a descendant of the bicentennial tall ships parade that kickstarted the Inner Harbor’s rebirth, was, by all accounts, great. Watching “Hamilton” the night before the Fourth on the lawn at St. John’s College sounds lovely.

You can’t do anything about the 100-degree heat forecast for a super hot Independence Day, so the hardy will hydrate and swelter through it. The rest should stay home.

But it isn’t the heat or the lack of commemorative Pepsi bottles that makes this milestone hard to enjoy. It’s the worrisome state of the republic.

When President Donald Trump isn’t wrecking the White House East Wing or planning a triumphal arch, he’s helping billionaire buddies warm the planet faster. When he’s not enriching his sons through a mining deal, lining his pockets with crypto or trashing the Reflecting Pool, he’s going to war with Iran.

Part of America fears the fall elections won’t stop the United States from losing its democracy before it reaches 252. Another part is cheering.

Those Bicentennial Barbie outfits and Maryland bicentennial license plates — $26.95 on eBay — made history look so ridiculous 50 years ago that they helped change the story we tell ourselves about the Revolution.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin caricatures were replaced with a deeper understanding of them as flawed, just like us.

“It is time for blacks and all people who have been victimized by the violent American nightmare of exploitation, militarism, racism, and sexism to recognize our common plight and create our own revolution,” future congressman John Lewis wrote. “We must rise above the distraction of the Bicentennial Celebration and work together to solve the problems which are eating away the very soul of our society.”

It wasn’t a rejection of the story, but a desire to see it for what it is — an incomplete effort to fulfill the dream of liberty the founders themselves didn’t fully comprehend.

When Maryland legislators commissioned Charles Willson Peale to paint “Washington, Lafayette, and Tilghman at Yorktown” in 1784, they wanted their story told.

Displayed at the State House, it is the most important historical painting in Maryland.

“Tench Tilghman carried the articles of capitulation, the surrender, to Philadelphia, and so he is holding the surrender, essentially in his hand,” said Robin Gower, state curator of artistic property.

It’s just not the end of the story.

When art groups hung murals across Annapolis this spring, they shared a version created by contemporary artist Greg Harlin.

“We didn’t want this to be generic,” Lindsay Bolin Lowery of Art at Large said. “We wanted it to be specific to Annapolis. What is Annapolis’ role in the larger founding of the country?”

Washington surrendering his commission hangs from a garage, Alexander Hamilton at the Maryland Inn looms over City Dock and cutouts of the Maryland signers of the Declaration line Church Circle.

This time, though, those left out of the narrative refuse to be silenced.

“Let’s talk Charles Carroll of Carrollton, signer and Maryland’s wealthiest slave owner, possessing as many as 400 human chattel at a time between his property in Howard County, Doughoregan — the Plantation, Poplar Island, and Annapolis at Duke of Gloucester Street,” wrote Janice Hayes-Williams, a historian of enslaved Americans in Annapolis.

She started naming families descended from those enslaved men and women still in the community: Addison, Carroll, Dorsey, Coates, Mahoney, Stinchcomb, Stewart, Joyce and her own.

And she staged a revival of her play “Dreams of My Soul,” about Carroll’s household in the time of the Declaration through the eyes of his enslaved servant, Moll — a real woman.

The complex story continues to unfold. Next month, Maryland will dedicate a State House monument to Black soldiers who fought for the Revolution.

None of this fuller understanding — the more perfect union worked toward imperfectly — will be part of Trump’s official celebration Saturday in Washington.

He’ll speak at 9:30 p.m. Given his love of his own voice, the 850,000 fireworks around the Reflecting Pool, on Potomac River barges and in West Potomac Park won’t launch until long after displays over Annapolis and Baltimore fade.

The hot air means many Americans will skip it.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

How did we get from Jefferson’s aspirational words to Trump’s braggadocio as the point of this celebration?

“The most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”

The Class of ’76 didn’t know it, but the story of our independence changed as we left that bicentennial stage in Ocean City. When the semiquincentennial ends, we, the people, will continue to make its meaning new again.

May that Glorious Fourth still be with us at the tricentennial.