Get back to our roots — don’t stage vain military parades
Of all the militaries in all the countries in all the world, do we really want to emulate that of the French?
Losers and the insecure hold regular military parades for no reason other than to strut their stuff, about which they feel inadequate, often for good reason. The French armed forces march up the Champs-Elysees every year to, what, give the Germans a scare, finally? The Soviet leadership massed in Red Square annually to see their missiles on trucks and to give Kremlinoligists a chance to see who was in and who was out in the Communist Party cabal. The North Koreans saber-rattle in public processions in Pyongyang because their impoverished dictatorship has to impress the starving in the countryside with something — circuses if not bread.
But when President Trump, nothing if not easily impressed by chest-puffing national bluster, happened to catch the Paris parade last year at the invitation of President Marcon, it gave him a terrible idea: That the United States military should have its own annual parade in Washington, D.C. First, he mused in the afterglow of the Parisian pomp, on the Fourth of July, but bigger and better than that of the French. Just to give them whatfor. Now he proposes to aim for Veterans Day.
It is simply an inexcusably terrible idea. An un-American one. We don’t do random military parades. We never have. We are secure in the fact that we have the best-trained, bestequipped, most modern armed forces in the world. That simple truth does not need any lilygilding.
As Richard Haass, the Republican former diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted after the White House floated the idea: “Our military hardware is not what impresses the world. Rather, it has been our democracy, respect for law, openness, universities, opportunity, economy, artists, mobility — in short, the characteristics that made America great. We need to get back to our roots, not stage parades.”
If American citizens want to have a tickertape procession down Broadway in our soldiers’ honor, sans tanks and borrowed glory-seeking politicians, fine.
Until then, can this tinhorn tyrant’s plans for such a vain cavalcade.