...to President Trump's desire to have his own version of a Red Square Roll-Out-The-Nukes-and-Salute! parade.
The first is to note the absurdity of all this. At a time when even hard power is best measured by a nation's development of things like quantum computing, our new tanks aren't really a good measure of our might. More fundamentally, this isn't really an American tradition, and in its sure-to-be-Trumpified version, it will likely come off as more than a little Graustark, or perhaps Duck Soup, with a chorus singing the Trumpian version of “Hail, Hail, Fredonia.” All in all, given the character of the president, a spectacle both ominous (this moron may actually want to use these weapons) and ridiculous.
My second reaction, though, may well be to hold the ridicule. That is, it's fine to ridicule Trump, who fairly personifies the ridiculous, but ridiculing the military is something else again. As Andy Levison, our pre-eminent scholar of the white working class, has noted, one defining element of that group's beliefs is its support for the military. That's in large part because the military offers working-class Americans a path to doing serious, valued work, in which achievement is rewarded, at a time when few other such options are open to them. To be sure, some of that work goes on in wars that shouldn't be fought in the first place, but that's hardly the fault of the enlistees. There's no reason, in other words, to ridicule them.
So: To the extent that this parade is Trumpified—to the extent that it comes off as a Hail to the Chief sashay, as goose-stepping comes to Mar-a-Lago—then yes, ridicule is required. But ridicule the military (which didn't ask for this march) and the men and women who fill its ranks? No way.
