March On

The old saying is that "everybody loves a parade."

Not true.  I don't like them at all.

I'd forgotten that the big one in Portland is today, the "Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade," or whatever it's called these days. I'm sure it has a hundred corporate sponsors again this year, so pick one and call it that.

It comes complete with breathless narration and Updates here.

I can hear a lot of bad high school marching bands as the parade passes near my pad.  When I was in school bands in the sixties I was forced-marched in parades, and I didn't like it even then.

I was a trumpeter, but in our marches I played a snare or bass drum. (Maybe that's why we were always out of step and sounded so ragged.)

Still, I must have been the best kid for the job because I was a pretty good trumpet player for that level, rotating between first and second chair.  I could keep time, barely.  I didn't care though.  The point, as with a lot of things, was just to bear with it and look forward to the day being over as soon as possible.

However, one good thing has happened since I watched my last Portland parade.  The display of military might has been eliminated.

But that's only because the tanks and rocket launchers, the troop transporters, jeeps and cargo haulers, the cruise missiles, the faux-replica Atom and Neutron Bombs on flatbeds, the privates high-stepping, the flags unfurling, the battalion guns spit-polished and shimmering under the sun--all the lethal stuff is now deployed around the world to protect our freedom and exceptional hegemony. Much of it has also been given to municipal and county police groups to help tamp down any and all threats by hostage-taking radicals in local communities.

That doesn't play in Portland, however, where the police state is frowned upon.  There's too big of a risk associated with having equipment out in the open here in Portland. The local terrorists in "Little Beirut" secretly plotting against the latte-drinking populace could get their hands on it--after polishing off their own lattes, of course.

That would not be good.


TS