montestewart wrote:I went to a parade on Saturday with a couple of MAGA friends. Beyond my interest in military tech, I was interested in seeing how the parade was viewed by attendees and contributing to a treatment of the parade (a waste of money to me, but sunk costs) as a celebration of the Army rather than a celebration of Trump. My grandfather and father-in-law were Army, along with numerous other relatives who have served in Army, Navy, and Air Force, and it seems important to me to show nonpartisan support for the military during a time when the president has openly tried to politicize the armed forces and deploy them in possibly unconstitutional ways.
The crowds were not nearly so great as predicted. Some of that could be from the mixed messages of the parade itself, or fear of rain, or the humid heat that day, but I think the general disorganization also contributed greatly, and I saw lots of people give up, turn around and go home. The actual entrances and security features did not cleanly correspond to the information disseminated. There was a bank of perhaps 50 security kiosks on the mall along 15th street, and to get to these, everyone was channeled into a single line that at various points was single file and after a point was undefined, snaking out onto Constitution Avenue, with no clear signage and no one directing traffic.
Police and military MPs were not always sure what anyone was supposed to do. We had tickets, but never encountered anyone who had any idea where or how we would use the tickets to get into ticketed areas. I have a feeling that perhaps outside of the official dignitary/photo op viewing areas, they simply did not allocate sufficient resources to deal with the parade. Maybe that’s not a surprise, considering the short ramp up time from the originally planned much smaller parade. As far as actual viewing went, it didn’t really matter because the parade continued beyond the official route, and I was able to stand in the front for most of the parade and also get a good view of the flyovers and fireworks.
Most of the official protests were not adjacent to the parade areas, but plenty of lefties hate rules, so there were still plenty of protesters. They took advantage of the chaos in getting into the secured viewing areas, making sure most attendees had to go through their protests to get in, lining the paths and joining the lines. I found that protesters were particularly good at snaking through crowds and several times followed a protester to make progress.
Explicit Trump support was much less than I anticipated. Not a sea of MAGA hats and shirts. My guess is somewhere around 15-25% openly treated it as at least partially a celebration of Trump but assume there were other Trump supporters that maybe saw open celebration of Trump as taking away from the stated purpose. Based on people I talked with and things I saw and heard, there definitely was a significant minority in attendance consisting of non-Trump fans.
Despite the apparent disorganization, poor communication, and lack of information, the police and military were generally very polite and tried to help as best they could, which is pretty remarkable considering the chaos, stress, and heat. I didn’t personally observe even minor abuse of protesters' rights (and didn’t observe any protesters abusing their right to protest, though I saw and heard protests that were variously angry, animated, and hilarious. I wondered whether security was going out of the way to not be the forceful retribution that Trump threatened.
I didn’t have too many political discussions with my MAGA friends, which I usually find pointless, but I did have a few reminders of their low information perspectives. Both of them viewed it as officially a partial celebration of Trump’s birthday, unconcerned when I told them that I didn’t think there has ever before been a federally sponsored celebration of a sitting president’s birthday. One of them literally asked me who was paying for it and seemed certain that Trump was paying for it personally, which got a big laugh out of me. They treated the estimates of parade expense as fake news, variously arguing that it didn’t really cost anything, that the taxpayers weren’t paying for it, or that it was a worthy expense.
I had to drag my friends through the protesters at the end because they wanted to stop and debate every one of them with their passionately irrational arguments. One of them, an immigrant, kept telling people who were pretty obviously born in the United States they should go back to their own country if they don’t like it here. Not sure how much of that was intentional irony. When she said that to me, I reminded her I was born less than five miles away.
I’m not really sure what ego massage and/propaganda Trump hoped to derive from his birthday parade. It was partially successful as a celebration of the Army, but on most counts it seemed a wastefully expensive failure. I visited the mall multiple times last week and saw countless crews working all along the length of the mall and its extended perimeter (Pennsylvania Avenue, White House Compound, New York Avenue, below Independence Avenue), working well into the night. With the short lead in window, there was a lot of overtime. I will not be surprised if the final “official” bill for the parade sounds suspiciously understated.
Wait, Fox said there were HUGE crowds...
I guess good athletes sometimes just don't have to pay attention in class.
