I suspect most of you did not watch any of Trump’s big, beautiful parade, featuring a whole bunch of United States Army personnel, forced by the chain of command into saluting and honoring Trump like he was what he imagines himself to be—the king. And yeah, they had all those anti-king rallies all over, but neither that nor the bad weather forecast stopped Trump’s parade.
Anyway, I watched quite a lot of this thing. It was pretty gruesome. But not like most people were fearing, with some kind of Nazi or Red Army extravaganza of scary looking military hardware and goose-stepping automatons. The way the guys driving the Army’s armored vehicles were acting on Saturday, those could have been big tractors and combines they were pushing along on Constitution Avenue. It was like they were driving floats at a Macy’s parade. Or like the whole thing was a parade for a county fair.
I have no problem with this informal presentation. You could argue it was in fact a kind of antifascist presentation it was so inept and slovenly at times. But it almost did too good a job in that respect. Because it kind of looked like what it was—a parade made up of a bunch of people who do not do parades. And they do not do parades for a number of reasons, chiefly because Americans have not for a long time seen much of a reason to have a military parade. Like what exactly would we be celebrating? The great victory in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or maybe we are pre-celebrating Trump’s great conquest of Iran.
Of course the alleged main reason, other than it being Trump’s birthday present to himself, was to acknowledge the Army’s 250th year of existence. I just did not see how that parade did much to further any positive acknowledgement of that event.
The entirely pro-fascist parade reporters told us the regime hoped the parade would help with recruitment, which even in the best of times and presidents is always a little bit disconcerting—what do they need more troops for exactly?—but with Trump in charge? It cannot be good. Especially not with the whole world on fire and Trump seemingly irresistibly being drawn into the bug light of what could be a really long and brutal military exercise in and around Iran.
As you may have seen, today Trump essentially ordered Iran to unconditionally surrender—to Israel. That sounds very likely to happen.
Anyway, have you noticed how the casualty reports—from anything and everything you can possibly imagine—continue to escalate the impression in all of us of life being this absurd little detour some ill-advised matter took and ended up being us for a brief dumb moment, before the tasteless chiefs of our dustpan’s part of the universe decided to send in Trump to put a stop to everyone’s existence, and if not that then certainly a stop to people’s hopes that any continuation of their existence was likely to have anywhere good to go.
Well, let’s just see if we can make it to Friday, or tomorrow morning?—before Trump picks out somebody else for Israel to blow the fuck up.
And yeah, I know, you are not even that bothered about this one, are you? Iran, or Iran’s regime, has not exactly worked super hard to earn the love and respect of the world, huh?
Salman Rushdie still has one eye left to watch his enemies burn.
Sometimes you just have to survive to win.
The people bombing the Iranian regime—and more and more Iranian people— know something about that.
