The one point that jumps out at me is contrary to the most common takes going around I\u2019m not sure it would actually represent a net increase in military pageantry for domestic consumption.
In recent years that stuff\u2019s been piggybacked on to the NFL as an exclusive-to-but-universal-within American institution and seasonal cycle, but that\u2019s falling from its perch and becoming pillarized.
Before that though, as recently as the mid-\u201890s I have the sense of *more* military parades, small town parades on Independence and Memorial Day, that would include veterans but also current military personnel and equipment (and high school marching bands, and the Shriners in their fezzes and micro-cars).
Maybe that hasn\u2019t declined it\u2019s just that since my age hit double digits I\u2019m not the kind of person that gets taken to see these things at 10AM on a day off. But I don\u2019t see as many secondhand depictions of them as I remember, either.
Maybe no one is that kind of person anymore, like the decline of church attendance, a lot of it is that in a world where the height of electronic connectivity was cable TV (or maybe a huge satellite dish in the yard) and multiple phone lines in your house, it was more appealing to get up and haul out early in the morning for the sake of doing/witnessing something interesting in the presence of others.
Maybe it\u2019s shifts in the military structure, that in going from draftee to recruit and then shrinking at the close of the Cold War, with far-flung bases closed and consolidated, any random town was less likely to have a critical mass of military equipment and military-identifying people around. Maybe I\u2019m too close to the coastal cities and if I moved nearer to a base or to the inland places I hear veterans tend to settle it\u2019d be different.
Maybe it\u2019s the Vietnam veterans\u2019 disillusionment from their military identities that left a gap that was only partly patched by Gulf War I enthusiasm, and the parade-organizing entities they avoided \u2013 American Legion, VFW \u2013 faltered. Maybe as the infantry mechanized and marches got replaced with highway commutes, parades just don\u2019t speak to veterans\u2019 nostalgic experience.
(Recently I\u2019m realizing what Gulf War I really meant in the American national narrative, a kind of way to dissipate the emotional pressures of a Cold War that we won without doing anything in particular, without a climactic battle or conquest. I remember all the yellow ribbons tied around trees to performatively worry for the sake of Our Boys Overseas in what was in retrospect a farcical turkey shoot.
I remember the way Boomer liberals mellowed by age kind of used it to reconcile with the military, and thru it the \u201creal\u201d America, that was still kind of understood as a generation gap with religious overtones, and not fully yet the red/blue tribalism as we take it today. That would go on to be the theme of Bill Clinton\u2019s campaign and presidency, really.
Everyone who had gutted it out through the military\u2019s unpopular \u201cbottom of the barrel\u201d years in the post-Vietnam \u201870s and \u201880s got to be called up from reserves for a quick victory and fete as returning heroes. Our flag officers - Schwarzkopf, Powell - got capstone achievements to their careers, all our Fulda Gap toys - the M1 Abrams, the F-117 and B-2 stealth planes, the A-10, the Patriot theater ballistic interceptors \u2013 got a live-fire demo\u2026)
BUT ANYWAY, in that regards I\u2019m inclined to see a big national parade as holding the rate of military pageantry in American life steady in the face of shifts, and not as increasing it to an obscene level as some critics. And thus as a fairly anodyne innovation in symbolic Presidential ritual like turkey-pardoning or the National Prayer Breakfast, and not a terrifying totalitarian specter.
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