I write on June 14, a full-docket news day. You’ll have heard some of the news. For one thing, June 14 is Flag Day in the United States, an opportunity to rally ’round and ponder the significance of its history and iconography. After all, “the Stars and Stripes” is not merely a heraldic description: it is also a distillation or epitome of a sentiment, a world view, and a political achievement.
June 14 is also the birthday of Donald Trump, the President of the United States. Given his celebration of an “America First” MAGA political program, it seems more than coincidental that he should share his birthday with a national holiday called “Flag Day.”
Ditto the fact that June 14 was the date of Trump’s big military parade in Washington. The date was chosen to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States Army. Sclerotic legacy outlets like The Atlantic (“The Shame of Trump’s Parade”) and The New York Times are throwing one of their signature snits about the parade. It’s just like military displays in the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states, they say.
I take the opposite view. I think the parade is both a salutary celebration of the army and a condign expression of American national pride. As the commentator Irving Kristol put it in the 1990s, “There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.” I agree.
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I note that June 14 was also the day on which some 2000 protests were scheduled to unfold across the nation. What were they protesting? The official title was “No Kings.” The protesters, you see, were claiming that Donald Trump was acting like a king by deploying the police power of the state to deport illegal aliens and to protect the immigration officials tasked with the job. Were the organizers harkening back to the origins of the Roman Republic in 509 BC when Brutus, avenging the death of Lucretia, declared that never again would Rome be ruled by a king? Maybe. It’s possible.
Probably not. In the event, the protests seem to have attracted a motley crew of aging boomers, paid professional protesters, disaffected academics, and confused teenagers. Several of the protests in Florida and elsewhere have been cancelled because of lack of interest.
But one clever observer, noting that the ex-Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, she of Anthony Weiner, and Alex Soros, spawn of George, were married today at a fancy mansion in the Hamptons, had the appropriate response to this shameless exhibition of our secular royalty: “No Kings.”
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Author: Ruth King
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