America Loves a Parade. Not.
Parades have a way of going off course. The most famous episode took place in Philadelphia during the culminating months of WW I. The government still needed to sell bonds for the war effort, and somebody thought that a parade would be the ticket. Two hundred thousand hapless citizens gathered on Broad Street to watch the spectacle of newly minted biplanes, soldiers, and Sousa bands.
Hapless, because many of them died within a week. Just before the parade in Philadelphia, soldiers had come to the city from Boston, unaware that they were carrying the so-called Spanish Flu. The hallmark of that outbreak, along with many that followed, was a fantastic level of communicability. The hospitals of the city were quickly overwhelmed. It turns out that if you jam 200,000 people together, even if they are standing in the open air, many of them will contract flu and quickly drop dead. It’s as certain as the stupidity of Ivermectin for COVID.
This summer’s planned parade will not likely ignite a plague. In fact, there’s a chance that it won’t happen at all. The last time King Donald floated this idea, the wily generals of his first term in office managed to extricate the country from his delusions. But he’s had plenty of time to incubate this dream, and there aren’t nearly enough generals to outwit him in this round. When all you’ve got is Peter Hegseth, there’s a very good chance that bad things will happen. Like, he’ll forget to take the ammunition out of the tanks.
What Trump wants is what he saw in France: an old-fashioned parade of military hardware churning through the streets of Washington D.C. to restore a sense of pride and patriotism. Something like Philadelphia in 1918 but honoring the anniversary of the American military. It doesn’t seem to matter that we don’t do this anymore, that military jingoism is no longer in our genes. War is sometimes a grim necessity, not an occasion for celebrating our prowess. We properly concentrate on the real issues of war-making, like the two expensive planes that slid off a carrier this week and are now somewhere in the sand at the bottom of the sea.
Nor is Trump concerned about expense. You may have noticed a slowing down of the economy. We are in the middle of a trade war that will likely end in ruin. People are saving their dollars for a recession, emptying the restaurants of the city at lunch time. Trump’s parade will likely cost millions and chew up the avenues that constitute its route. It seems impossible that we would spend money on such a folly, but the fantastic appetites of this madman president are unlikely to be moderated by the need for frugality. He probably figures that we can pay for the parade by closing a few more rural hospitals.
Because finally, it’s not the country that counts. By some fantastic coincidence, the planned date of the parade is also Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. I saved this for last because it is so brilliantly ironic. Scratch deep enough on any proposal from Donald Trump and you will find the core of insistent self-interest. Donald Trump wants a birthday party, and he has decided to spend our money to fund it. When a baby bangs his spoon on the tray of his highchair, there is at least the excuse that he is a baby. When Donald Trump bangs a spoon, it’s just weird and awful.
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