President Trump has asked the Pentagon to explore holding “a celebration” for Americans to show their appreciation for the armed forces, the White House said, amid reports that military leaders have begun planning a military parade at his request.

Trump repeatedly has expressed an interest in holding a display of America’s military might and upped his calls for a parade after witnessing the Bastille Day celebrations on a trip to France last summer.

The last point rings true in that Trumpesque way (more so than the “gorilla channel”) – “The marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France,” one military official told the Post on the condition of anonymity. “This is being worked at the highest levels of the military”…  He then told French President Emmanuel Macron that he was considering having a military parade on Independence Day, saying that he wanted “a really great parade, to show our military strength.” – You can imagine Trump thinking to himself while sitting next to Macron at the parade: “If these cheese eating surrendering monkeys with their white battle flags and tanks with five reverse gears can do it, why can’t we, the biggest military power in the world do something as cool as that?”

Personally, I’m agnostic on military parades. I associate them from a Polish childhood with communist countries and associated despotisms preening to the world and to their own people. The United States tends not to do them too much, except following the won wars. It generally doesn’t need them as a show of strength because every sane person around the world knows that America is pretty strong. Or at least did, until the last decade or so of withdrawals, cut-backs and timidity.

On the other hand, I do like the concept of celebrating and thanking the men and women (the peoplekind, as Justin Castro-Trudeau would say) of the armed forces for putting their lives on the line and standing ready to protect us and our way of life, a dangerous and largely thankless job, underpaid and underappreciated (to say the least) by a large part of the society who think them baby-killers, dupes, fools and thugs.

I just don’t know whether a military parade with tanks and ballistic missiles is the best way to show our appreciation. Maybe we could take a better care of homeless and ill veterans instead.

Having said all that, for every Trump action there is an equal and opposite over-reaction.

“We have a Napoleon in the making here,” says California Democrat Rep Jackie Speier. Twitter is awash with wailing and gnashing of teeth, Hitler comparison are flying thick and fast, as are those with Iran, North Korea and the Soviet Union (I guess that these are the bad guys now). So are the perennial concerns about the waste of $22 million such a parade might cost, all from the people for who the rest of the year are not particularly concerned about the taxpayers’ money and what the government does with it. And then there are the dreams of #Resistance:

You might hate Trump but you don’t win the middle ground by hating on the military. And comparing yourself to brave dissidents facing death from a tyrannical government just makes you look like the ultimate douche. You’re not resistance, you’re a spoiled little brat with pathetic dreams of grandeur. As someone has once said, you want more Trump? That’s how you get more Trump.

Myself, I dream about an alternative universe where the President doesn’t have constant brainwaves and his opposition doesn’t respond with instant hysterics to every story or a trolling attempt.

Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk where this piece also appears.

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