* Sigh * Why, of why couldn’t the South Koreans have stopped His Lowness on his way back over that imaginary line for not having a valid passport and visa for entry into South Korea? After more than a couple of quick hours with Trump, Kim would have found out real quick what it feels like to wake up sober alongside to someone you fell asleep drunk next to. But no, they had to let him out, and back on Air Force One, and the world breathes a sigh of relief while we go back to crying in our beer.
And what a welcome back this turned out to be. Donald Trump without Fox and Friends in the morning is like your 3 year old without Barney the Dinosaur, trouble is sure to follow. Turns out that Emperor Numbnuts I wants actual military tanks proudly displayed on the national mall for the July 4th celebration. Apparently Ivanka forgot to pack his medication again. Either that, or he wants us to start getting used to the sight of the military on American streets prior to January 21, 2021.
Trump just doesn’t get it, does he? He just doesn’t get this whole America thing, he must have been getting his bone spurs examined during American history class. The 4th of July isn’t a military celebration at all, in fact it’s exactly the opposite. On July 4th, we celebrate our freedom from a foreign power that tried to use it’s military to subjugate us! Why is that simple concept so difficult for him to wrap his tiny mind around?
But Trump also fails to grasp our national feelings on a much deeper and more fundamental level. Here in the United states, we don’t honor and celebrate militarism, we celebrate and venerate the troops! We don’t stand around and drool over the hardware, we throw flowers at the men and women who use the hardware to keep us safe! Militarism celebrates the offensive power of a country’s military, we choose instead to celebrate the strength of our self defense.
In World War I, German citizens lined the streets to cheer the passage of Big Bertha, the revolutionary siege cannon that laid waste to the Belgian fortresses of Liege and Namur as it rolled slowly through town, shaking the ground. But somehow none of those people bothered to show up to cheer the defeated troops as they straggled back in the opposite direction in 1918. Funny how that works.
But in both 1018 and 1945, citizens packed the streets like it as the second coming of the Rolling Stones to cheer the return of the troops. They threw flowers, ticker tape showered down, and women broke through to kiss soldiers they had never met, and would never see again. And there wasn’t a fucking tank, or artillery piece, or half track in sight, just the men and women who did the job, America wasn’t celebrating a victorious conquest, it was massively celebrating the sound rejection of an attempted conquest. Self defense in other words.
The rest of it is bad enough. Trump has already turned us against each other in a way we haven’t seen since slavery and the Vietnam war. He is trashing our every institution of government like the aforementioned Rolling Stones in a Cleveland hotel room. He has turned the country that was the elder statesman on the world stage into the kid in the corner with the dunce cap on his head. All of that is bad enough. But now, he wants to mess with our most celebrated tradition, the very celebration what makes us who and what we are. Fuck him. Sideways.
Cross posted on Politizoom.com