I’ve never been one for parades.
They’re boring, boastful, false. Reading, talking, walking, sleeping are more fun. The music, at its best, lacks subtilty, at its worst – don’t ask. Jollity that’s obligatory isn’t.
A parade differs from a procession. A procession heads toward a solemn goal: grave, graduation, altar. Anticipating an awesome climax, processions are exciting, humble, sincere. As a schoolboy, I loved processing with the choir in my snowy surplice and hated tromping in a smelly uniform with the band. (I played tuba, intensifying my tedium.)
Military parades rub me especially wrong. Armies exist to prevent killing by killing. Peacekeeping, a euphemism, means war-prevention. I’m all for keeping safe. Safety is a prerequisite for the activities I enjoy. But boasting of one’s strength feels puerile. Tanks and missiles on parade resemble toys for boys.
Tyrants use parades to intimidate. Democrats (lower case d) favor persuasion to coercion. A tyrant’s argument is “Do it or else;” a democrat’s, “Do it because.”
The Nameless One’s big beautiful parade, forming up in our capital as I type, gives me hives. Everything about it disgusts me, most of all that the nation sashaying is my own.
Am I or America out of step? When and how did we exchange dancing shoes for jackboots?
Adolescents flex their pecs when they’re feeling insecure. Grown-ups likewise. When reason fails, we revert to the argument of force: “Do it or else.” I shudder recalling the few occasions I clenched my fists in fury. Yes, I was provoked but, no, I am not that guy!
Why did the most secure people in history – physically, economically, medically, politically secure – select an illiterate thug for our chief?
We got spooked – this is my thesis – by our insignificance. Capitalism brilliantly supplied and resupplied our needs, so we had less and less we had to do to survive. Advances in transportation and communications lessened our dependence on community, which had once given us place and pride. Soaring cities shrank us into insects. Now along comes AI to make even our intellects superfluous.
Yikes! Why exist if we have nothing essential to do? Peasants and pioneers have no choice but to keep plugging: do or die. The poor are rich in necessity, the rich are starved.
Existential speculation is unusual among humans. We tend not to ponder why we’re here and, if we do, not for long. Religions relieve our doubts with their answer-books. Santayana, in his mordantly witty aphorism, got it right: “That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
While most of us do not brood about such mysteries – why make trouble? – we all feel the difference between being prized and being tolerated. Your eyes on these words encourage me to imagine I matter.
Materialism deprived Americans of mattering. Our avidity for celebrities made the majority feel overlooked. Plutocrats’ ostentatious greed made sufficiency feel insufficient. Help desks made us feel helpless. We worked hard to divert ourselves from our insignificance – we gorged on food, sports, travel, exercise, fashion, incessant screens – yet deep down we felt disrespected, dissatisfied. Democracy had outgrown the need for its citizens, except as manipulable widgets on election day. Rancor revolted. Hating was exciting at least.
The Nameless One’s big beautiful boastful beastly parade is a raised middle finger in the face of obnoxious elites, an adolescent muscle flex, a threat and a taunt. You Harvards and judges and scientists and “legacy media” – when did that become a slur? – and all you superior know-it-alls, who’s more necessary now? “Do it or else!”
Jesus wept.