Linda Kinstler on Trump's Parade
| This week for the NYR Online, Linda Kinstler writes a dispatch from the “Army Birthday Festival,” the military parade in Washington, D.C., that Donald Trump convened last weekend to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the army’s founding and, as it happens, the seventy-ninth anniversary of Trump’s birth. [It] had the feel of an arms expo combined with a military recruitment fair…. Kids in Make America Great Again hats clambered inside assault helicopters…. Spectators climbed on top of Stryker combat vehicles or took turns holding guns equipped with Smartshooter systems that are designed to “significantly enhance lethality and user survivability.”… The last time there was a military parade in Washington was in 1991, a “victory celebration” to mark the end of the Gulf War. Trump had said that this parade, too, was intended to celebrate American victories, by which he seemed to mean all of them, across time.
Below, alongside Kinstler’s essay, are four articles from our archive about the military and nostalgia. Whatever else it might be, a military parade is always a reminder of how readily the armed forces can be deployed both at home and abroad. From 1948, nearly every able-bodied young man in the United States served and lived side by side with Americans of all colors, all in strict alphabetical order, sleeping bunk to bunk in what amounted to brotherly endurance of the cold, heat, discomfort, and misery of military training. —July 16, 2012 Over and over, I heard soldiers talk about being hard-pressed to pay the rent, of having a child and being without health care, of yearning to escape a depressing town or oppressive family, of wanting to get out and see the world.
—April 3, 2008 “Patience is short, prices are high, traffic is congested; patriotic pride runs rampant. The Disney in us all has created a nationwide American Revolutionland and, at least within these borders, there is no place to hide.” —May 15, 1975 The ideals of socialism are anathema to them even though, paradoxically, the West Pointer is entirely cared for by the state from his birth in an army hospital (if he is born into a military family) to taps at government expense in a federal bone yard. Yet the West Pointer takes this coddling as his due and does not believe that steel workers, say, ought to enjoy privileges that belong rightfully to the military elite. Retired officers are particularly articulate on this point, and their passionate letters supporting the AMA’s stand against socialized medicine are often as not written from government-paid private rooms at Walter Reed.
—October 18, 1973 Special Offer
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