I'm 70 now and I remember when parades used to be fun—bands, bunting, some big Army boom-booms for the kids to cheer over, every high school bandmaster doing their best Robert Preston cosplay. I remember when they were ceremonies of communal joy. You could mark your calendar by them. Homecoming parades. Veterans Day, which was Armistice Day when I was very young.
And then there was this leaden spectacle on Saturday, June 14.
I have never experienced such a joyless, lifeless, and sterile mass event in my entire life. Grim-faced soldiers, marching past half-empty grandstands, many of them obviously wanting to be somewhere else. No bands. Little bunting. Just piped-in rock music and MAGA hats. If this truly was meant to honor the 250 years of the United States Army, all we got was an endless procession of uniformed troops looking like they’d prefer to have been at Valley Forge. The president, sitting on the reviewing stand in that weird, forward-leaning attitude that he has, rarely smiling, a skunk at his own garden party. Scores of people being funneled through cattle-runs of metal grates just for a chance to sit on the lawn of the Washington Monument and listen to bad music and speeches so dull and listless that they’d have made Demosthenes get out of the business and open an olive oil stand.
I think there probably was more good feeling and genuine emotion when they took Jack Kennedy out to Arlington for the last time.
abcnews.go.com
