Parade on His Reign

Hello.

I did not attend Donald Trump’s grotesque, gloriously under-attended military parade. I watched it — pretty much through finger-steepled eyes — at a Belgian bar and restaurant in D.C. where we ordered the least American thing we could — French fries dipped in mayonnaise.

It reminded me of something I wrote 20 years ago, not long after the initial American invasion of Iraq. I was in Paris, working on a funny story about the bad feelings between France and the United States — remember the applied idiocy of “Freedom Fries”?

I happened to be in Paris on Bastille Day, so I joined the throngs watching the annual military parade down the Champs Elysees. This is said to be the event Donald Trump witnessed that impressed him and filled him with a fierce determination to hold a similar parade, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Army as well as his own shitty superannuated 79th birthday. Trump has lately been in the news for falling asleep during public appearances. It happened again at the parade.

Looking back at what I wrote then, in Paris, I am struck by the bloated, dilapidated soul of any human being who would be impressed by this display. I am an admirer of the French culture, but was nauseated by the spectacle. This is the section of my story relating to it:

—

Bastille Day on the Champs-Elysees, Paris's grand boulevard. I've been told what to expect, but it still comes as a surprise. The French celebration of their day of independence is a hyper-military display, featuring a parade of tanks and other massive armored hardware one would more expect to see in Beijing or at the central square of a consonant-oriented country with a name like Tkczjrkistan.

Before the festivities, Jerome and I mingle with the marchers, companies of cadets in their dress finery -- with cutlasses in scabbards and swagger sticks and splendiferous, ornate multicolored uniforms of a sort that would not be worn by the American military outside of some cruel hazing ritual. Some wear aprons and carry axes. One man wears a hat featuring a dangly, red feather-tufted ball. I want to tell the guy I have seen this precise fashion accessory in a book by the distinguished American author Dr. Seuss, but there are too many cutlasses around.

There are waves of flyovers by Mirage jets, and long columns of treaded vehicles rumbling on the cobblestones, giant amphibious tanks with rear-mounted howitzers, an endless march of businesslike war machines in camouflage green, missile launchers and troop transports. For a while it is truly impressive. Then the vehicles begin looking more and more ordinary until we are watching what seem to be military garbage trucks.

The crowd is demonstrating an odd solemnity, at least by our standards. There are no balloons dancing or Frisbees flying -- just polite, almost awed, applause. In the ensuing sweltering summer weeks, thousands of elderly French will die alone of heatstroke, victims of an inadequate public health safety net. But at the moment, surrounded by symbols of power, people just seem . . . reassured.

You don't see this sort of display in the United States, a country that in three minutes could -- not to put too fine point on it -- flatten France like a crepe suzette. We do not flaunt our might in this way. We do not need to. We do not whistle in the dark.

—

That’s what it was like, to me — an embarrassment of nationalism performed by a second-rate world power trying to hold on to a past image of itself, before it was struck by global irrelevance. Before it became a footnote. The ostentatious stupidity on display in the Champs Elysees made me proud to be an American.

Sigh.

It was exactly like the grotesquerie Trump visited on us all a couple of days ago, ripping apart the streets with tank treads, displaying our alleged fierceness in a world where we are increasingly less mighty and less defensible, right down to the military garbage trucks.

Truck Fump.

—

So. Anyway. Several readers asked me to update them on the travails of Grandpa The Cat. I’m happy to.

Grandpa is still a phenomenal hissing, vicious asshole. Here is a video of the cat — who, by the way, appears to be a female but will remain “Grandpa” — accepting from Rachel an offering of a morsel of hot dog. Grandpa still lives in a storage room, among clock tools and antique clock parts and poisonous cleaning products.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

—

I will see you all on Thursday, with the Invitational, or possibly before. Please reach into your pocket, unless you are currently naked in which case you should not do that, and see if you have four dollars and fifteen cents. That will buy you a month of The Gene Pool, where you get awesome stuff like this. Send it here:

If you ARE naked, feel free to upload a picture. I will accept that in lieu of cash.

—