CSotD: Chienlit Parade
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Pardon me if I borrow a slogan from the 1968 May/Juin riots in Paris, but it seems we're doomed to talk about Dear Leader's stupid parade.
As it happens, I can sort of avoid politics for another moment and still be relevant, because Bug Martini asks a question that is elsewhere being framed as an accusation.
That is, why do police seem to sit back and watch the destructive chaos after a championship, when they step in to quell a political demonstration at the first broken window?
And a large part of the answer is that those post-game riots are a bunch of drunks who, even if they don't pass out in their own vomit, will tone down and go home after an hour or two, while a political demonstration is more open-ended.
Happy drunks here, sober pissed-off people there, a different situation.
Philadelphia's mayor's office reported that, while there were a few incidents, the scene in the street was, if not entirely "peaceful," at least joyously within reason, and that the riotous stuff on TV was actually isolated and atypical.
Well, we've had that discussion: If 5,000 people at a demonstration quietly listen to a speech about the Geneva Conventions while one clown in a blood-stained Uncle Sam suit with a toy machine gun parades around, we know what picture will be in the paper the next morning.
And they did bust the kid in the car-flipping video and don't it suck to be related to someone semi-famous?
But there's also the hostility factor, and that ties into the May/Juin riots in which DeGaulle made his shit-the-bed reference about the students in the street, which inspired some great posters but also prolonged and exacerbated the confrontations.
I saw a 25-years-later documentary in which Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a major student leader then, said that they had started out just walking and chanting and singing and swilling wine and kissing in the streets until the police stepped in and started trying to stop them, at which point, chi got real.
However — and there's always a "however" — the big difference is that, in France, there was not a divide between the students and the working class, such that, when DeGaulle hurled his insults and the police unleashed their batons, the result included major general strikes that shut down France's economy.
By contrast, the public response to the police riots in Chicago later that summer was horror, certainly. The whole world was indeed watching.
But the working class did not rise up, and, while Walter Reuther's UAW was sympathetic to the anti-war movement, most blue-collar Americans did not identify with the students the way they did in France.
Then, once he was in office, Nixon began the process of driving a wedge between the working class and liberalism, which was expanded upon by Reagan, exploited by the NRA and is now filling the basket of Deplorables for Dear Leader.
Mike Peters is not the only cartoonist who mocked the childishness of Trump's desire for a parade, but it's a motif for which his style is perfect.
And Jim Morin brought up the chickenhawk issue: Trump had his chance at military glory and passed it up, a point upon which Andy Borowitz also capitalized.
It's a tribute to the success of that wedge between Deplorables and The Rest of Us that Trump gets a pass on his draft-dodging.
It doesn't help that the current crop of progressives apparently have no sense of history and don't realize that taking a student deferment (or "four," for those unaware of how long it takes to get a bachelor's degree) was not draft-dodging, and that millions of young men did that, including many who then enlisted.
Conflating a legitimate, common deferment with the ol' "Letter from the Family Doctor" dodge takes the edge off that latter bit of privileged cowardice.
But we've seen it before: Clinton was attacked for what seems to have mostly been good timing and luck in not getting drafted, while Quayle and Bush were absolved of pulling strings to duck into the National Guard.
And when the rightwing was confronted with a genuine war hero in the form of John Kerry, they concocted lies to undercut his achievements and deny his record.
Now we've got a genuine draft-dodger on our hands, and the left insults millions of men by screaming "five deferments!" while the right pretends they don't know.
But Jimmy Margulies brings up a question that sure seems relevant.
One of the rightwing fables of our time is of the vet who was never thanked, and it works, because, while the vast majority of veterans feel they've done their duty, they're content with their lives and they've gone back to whatever civilian things they'd postponed in the meantime, you'll always find a group in any crowd, from any occupation, who feel underappreciated.
Accordingly, while it is wildly inappropriate to demonstrate for civil rights at a football game, we haul out the flags and send the jets flying overhead and bring a group of medal winners to flip the coin before the Super Bowl, because we owe vets the thanks they never got.
Wanna bet whether those who felt they were never thanked will be content now?
However, if the unthanked vet is political fantasy, the homeless vet is very real, and the role of PTSD in their homelessness should not be underplayed.
But we can't afford to help homeless vets. It would increase the deficit.
Like malnourished children and people without healthcare, efforts to help them would be too expensive and we'd need to compensate by cutting family planning and heating assistance and aid to families with dependent children, and slashing Medicare and Social Security.
But we can certainly stroke Dear Leader's insatiable ego with a multi-million dollar extravaganza.
He's ready for his close-up, and Ann Telnaes provides it, while Phil Ochs provides the soundtrack:
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