Vanity on Parade

Military parades are a joke, like an old man driving a convertible or marrying someone fifty years younger than them (or both). In other words, they are a false conceit and damn expensive. To be fair, I suppose an old woman marrying someone fifty years younger than them is also a false conceit and probably expensive. One difference between such marriages and military parades might be that such relationships may actually be mostly about some version of love that works for both participants. Military parades, on the other hand, have nothing to do with love—not even love of country, whatever that is. At best, they are exercises in some kind of fetishism revolving around guns, planes, tanks, and dominance and submission via the use of weaponry.

It doesn’t surprise me that Donald Trump wants a military parade. He fetishizes power and thinks he has more than anyone else. Seeing all those big guns sticking up in the air as the treads on vehicles painted in camouflage tear up DC’s streets might get him the thrill the women and girls he assaulted might never know because of his actions. Will the Blackhawks in the parade take a day off from endangering civilian airliners near National Airport and drop lines and kidnap people who are protesting or just look like immigrants? I bet when he discovered that the US Army was celebrating its birthday on June 14^th, which also happens to be his birthday, he knew in the fatty tissue surrounding his heart that the moment had come. General Patton eat your heart out. Same to you Adolf and Benito.

Donald Trump can have the most beautiful and militaristic parade in the history of the world because his army is having a birthday on the same damn day as Washington’s Caligula, holder of the greatest mandate in the history of mandates. I have to be honest, one of the first places my mind went to was to a day in 1970 when Richard Nixon’s presidential guard appeared in “double-breasted white tunics trimmed with gold braid and gold buttons and stiff plastic shakos decorated with the White House crest.” The uniforms were designed by Washington, DC tailor Jimmie Muscatello and cost a cool $16,000 in 1969 dollars. Like the parade Mr. Trump hopes to have, the uniforms were a personal conceit of Nixon’s and ridiculed across the mediascape. Some were reminded of ushers from the movie palaces of the 1940s and 1950s, while others mentioned the 1959 satirical film The Mouse That Roared. The uniforms eventually ended up on the backs of Iowa’s Meriden-Cleghorn High School Band after being purchased for $10 each from in 1980. ^[1] The vanity in these uniforms and Trump’s military parade would be comical if….well, actually they’re just comical.

Much of the conversation among mainstream media folks and politicians regarding Trump’s parade concerns the cost. After all, this is an administration that claims to be reducing government waste. If you think about it, though, those reductions are not focused on the military (except for its departments working on racial and gender equity), but on almost everything that doesn’t have to do with the military. You know, helping people eat, helping people learn, preventing fraud and excessive profit—those kinds of things. If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be a trillion dollar military, much less a celebration of its 250 years of killing and marauding. Unfortunately, most US residents hold the military that does such things in their name in the highest regard, probably because somewhere in their brain they know that, when all is said and done, it’s the military that brings them the goods. It’s the military that pushes people and their governments around so the residents of John Winthrop’s city on the hill can purchase the latest SUV on credit and drive wherever the hell the roads take ‘em. It’s the military that serves as the bullyboys that kill the folks in the way of US capital and its predation. The popularity of certain songs celebrating the military—by Lee Greenwood, Francis Scott Key or John Philip Sousa, for example—seem to prove this unwarranted popularity. Indeed, I wonder how many decrying Trump’s parade have little to no issues with the flyovers by US warplanes at sporting events when those flyovers are nothing but expensive celebrations of the military reminiscent of the macho swagger in many locker rooms. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, go team!!

Yes, Tripoli, Libya where the trumpists under the direction of Herman Goering’s spiritual love child Stephen Miller want to send those kidnapped by ICE, la migra, the trumpist gestapo. Libya, which was destroyed in the name of the dollar and the direction of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama for reasons yet to be honestly discerned, is being considered as another place to hold US residents, now that El Salvador seems to be having second thoughts and Rwanda’s offer to involve itself in what is essentially human trafficking. The last time the United States and certain African rulers were involved in trafficking humans was before the US civil war, when millions of Africans were kidnapped, transported and enslaved. While no one knows what the intentions of the current traffickers are, it’s a pretty safe bet that the lives of those who are kidnapped, removed and trafficked overseas will never be the same.

You know, a man can wear a uniform and order others to march for him, but he can’t make them respect him. Somewhere in that consciousness that is Donald Trump he must know that. I wonder how it makes him feel. Then again, maybe he has no clue. Or maybe he doesn’t care.

NOTES

1. Pomp and Circumstance, Oct. 19, 2021, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/news/pomp-and-circumstance; accessed 5/7/2025 ↑

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