I don't advocate for or against a parade. I think it'd be ok, but really, it should signify some sort of Victory...I don't care if its OIF or OEF, or WWI....as I said earlier, I'd fully support a parade if we could get the hell out of Syria....but, regardless of your position, this a pretty good read from Politico.
Even if there's too many words for ya, just read the first line..... :)
If you wanted to come up with a parody of the Trump years, it’d be hard to get any better than the president proposing a parade, and the opposition erupting in outrage.
The Pentagon has confirmed that it is in the preliminary stages of planning a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue — one of President Donald Trump’s fondest desires.
Trump was, understandably, impressed in a visit to France last July by the pageantry of the Bastille Day parade. Despite the disdain conservatives have long heaped on France as a country of pansies, it has a storied military tradition and a deep sense of national pride as one the world’s oldest nation-states, one that has always been at the center of Western civilization.
The Bastille Day parade dates back to the 1880s. Nothing that the U.S. comes up with will match its resonance or its beloved, unifying nature.
Trump’s motivation for ordering up a parade anyway is pretty obvious. He likes big, brassy displays, and he gets a kick out of being the commander in chief of the most impressive military on the planet.
The president’s impulse itself shouldn’t be enough to roll the armor down Pennsylvania Avenue, but we don’t lack for reasons to honor our military. The Pentagon has already floated the idea of a parade on Veterans Day to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, an epic event by any standard. We’re also overdue to honor on a large scale the sacrifice of our troops over the past 15 years in the war on terror.
Trump’s critics sniff a dangerous authoritarianism afoot.
“We have a Napoleon in the making here,” pronounced Rep. Jackie Speier. Of course, coming to power in a coup, literally crowning himself emperor of France and conquering a swath of Europe all weigh much more heavily — and tell us much more about Napoleon’s political character — than any of his parades.
A columnist for the New York Daily News harumphed that Trump “has no sense of American exceptionalism.” It’s odd to locate American exceptionalism, not in the Bill of Rights or Declaration of Independence, but in the (relatively recent) absence of military parades.
“This is beneath us as a nation,” said retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, who served as a State Department spokesman in the Obama administration.
It’s not obvious when it became untoward or dangerous for the U.S. to hold military parades. Are we supposed to believe that the integrity of American character has depended on having no military parades since 1991, when there were big honking ones in Washington and New York to celebrate the end of the Gulf War?
In Washington, Patriot missiles, M270 multiple launch rocket systems, and M109 self-propelled howitzers appeared on the parade route, and a freakin’ Harrier jump jet landed on the Mall. In New York, they dragged an A-7 Crusader attack jet down the Canyon of Heroes. The republic survived.
The unsatisfactory outcomes of the Vietnam and Korean Wars meant we didn’t have parades to mark those conflicts (we should have). But it didn’t occur to anyone that it was inappropriate or undemocratic to display military hardware. During World War II, there were big military parades in New York City, and state-of-the-art self-propelled howitzers drove by the New York Public Library with no one getting the vapors.
Dwight Eisenhower’s first inaugural showcased an 85-ton atomic cannon, and the second, the Redstone ballistic missile. They broke out four nuclear missiles for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, along with an impressive battery of tanks, armored vehicles and self-propelled howitzers.
The 27-year hiatus on military parades had a close call when it was briefly proposed that we have a ticker-tape parade in New York City for Iraq War veterans after President Barack Obama’s pull-out in 2011. To her credit, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow supported the idea as a very public way to thank the troops: “I would go, and so would everyone I know.”
It is true that leaders of Russia, China and North Korea exult in military parades. But it’s not military parades that make these regimes dangerous. The Bastille Day parade and — on a much smaller, quainter scale — Trooping the Colour don’t mean France or England are anything like Russia or China, only that the military is recognized as a source of national pride and unity.
The parade controversy is another sign that the place of patriotism in our national life, and what that patriotism should consist of, is a Trump-era flashpoint.
Trump’s critics tend to think that patriotism itself is atavistic, or that its locus should be only in our ideals. Trump’s patriotism is more grounded, and insists that we are a nation, not just an abstraction.
This is why a military parade once in a while is a healthy thing: We should be proud, not just of our troops, but of our military as such. We should be proud of our strength. We should be proud of our weaponry, highly proficient machines fashioned by the most technically adept society the world has ever known.
Ideally, everyone would realize this. Once upon a time, we did. But now the best argument against Trump’s parade is that it will become a cultural-war flashpoint and “the resistance” will try its utmost to ruin the affair. Just imagine a protester in a **** hat in a Tiananmen Square-style stand off with an M-1 Abrams tank.
Meanwhile, on July 14, the Bastille Day parade will in all likelihood come off once again without a hitch — as a democratic polity honors the national role of its military, with no nervous breakdowns.
Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.
