THE PLANE!
I'm sitting outside with my dogs on a beautiful afternoon. People are walking toward downtown dressed in green for the St. Patrick's Day Parade. A low rumble in the sky becomes louder and louder. The air starts to vibrate. Then, out of the blue, a warplane — yes, a warplane — slices through the sky.
It's the military "flyover" that now marks the beginning of too many public events. Football games. Parades. Pep assemblies. Whatever.
It's the anti-culture brought in to make us grateful for culture. A symbol of brute force brought in to celebrate civilization.
It's obscene.
Only people who have never lived in a war zone — where warplanes mean bombs and death — could think this is neat.
Rah rah, America.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is fighting the enemy at home: homosexuals.
The very butch Marine Gen. Peter Pace, right, instead of looking after military affairs, is going around saying gays are immoral.And: Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback is backing the Pentagon's top general. The Kansas senator planned to send a letter to President Bush supporting Pace, who earlier this week likened homosexuality to adultery and said the military should not condone it by allowing homosexual personnel to serve openly.
God knows homosexuals played no part in creating arts and letters and music and all the things that make this culture worth defending. I bet there's not a single gay person at the St. Patrick's Day Parade. So why should there be one symbolically protecting it in a warplane?
Meanwhile: In Mexico City — yes, our "backward" Third World neighbor to the south — the first legal gay civil unions were celebrated yesterday.
How is it possible that I could have a civil right in MEXICO that I do not have in the UNITED STATES of AMERICA? What is the use of that big old jet fighter anyway?
posted by kc @ 1:03 PM
18 comments
18 Comments:
I like military flyovers. I'm kinda scared of them, since I'm afraid of large things and loud things, but they are breathtaking.
But I couldn't agree with you more about Pace and Brownback. And what about Garrison Keillor? Have you seen the disgrace of his latest column?http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/03/14/keillor/index.html
In it, he seems to be saying that gays who want kids should stop thinking about themselves and go marry a nice person of the opposite sex. For the sake of the children. I saw an online discussion of this column where people debated whether it was excusable because he's old and becoming feeble minded and he's on a deadline. Salon should pull the plug on his column.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Okay, I'm going to try the fancy html way: The Keillor column is here.
Military flyovers are jingoistic shit.
Have you ever examined why you like them?
You might as well say you like big-ass nuclear mushroom clouds because they're breathtaking.
Or rockets' red glare. Bombs bursting in air. Breathtaking, all.
There's a huge air show every year here along the lake shore. I happen to live about a block from the lake, and for the three days of practice and show, I feel like I'm living in a war zone. It's actually really scary to have military jets doing flybys for three straight days. Disconcerting, at least.
I went to the air show, once, to see what it was all about. It was a long commercial for the military. I left early.
"jingoistic" is a great word.
Three days of flyovers?! How could you stand it?
I've been to a couple of airshows — one when I was a little kid, and I got to ride in an old warplane with a propeller. I liked it, as a personal, visceral experience, even though I got really airsick!
But that's different from a flyover, which is not a personal experience. It's a social experience. It's Uncle Sam whipping out his big flying dick for all the Americans on the ground — just to say "Look at my big flying dick! Isn't it big and loud and impressive? Aren't we mighty Americans? Let's go stick our big flying dick in the sands of someone else's desert!"
Yes, I have examined why I like military flyovers, but I have been told in the past that I tend to miss the point of your posts and only argue about some little thing I disagree with.
So this time, I only briefly mentioned (in a positive way) my feelings about flyovers and spent the rest of my comment discussing things pertaining to the point of your post.
If you want to discuss military flyovers, here or elsewhere, we can do that. I just didn't think you would want to.
And don't be offended. Friends don't have to agree on everything, and I don't think any less of you just because we have different opinions. I hope you feel the same about me.
Erin says: "I like flyovers. And I like airshows. And I don't find them jingoistic. I don't see anything wrong with thinking it's neat to see
big, cool planes flying by.
And maybe it's just my upbringing, with my dad's military history, but I really don't see anything wrong with celebrating the military. My
dad, who was staunchly antiwar, didn't think of that stuff as whipping out our big American dicks. I understand the extreme faults in the
system, but I guess I just look at it differently."
More St. PAtrick's Day cheer:
“The fact I’m here in Dublin and able to march and participate in inclusive events should send a message of how backwards the New York parade is.”
— Christine Quinn, the first openly gay leader of the New York City Council, who is boycotting the more conservative New York parade because the organizers refuse to let gay and lesbian groups march.
George says: "I have to say that I agree with Erin; I enjoy them, too. And it's not just an American thing, a lot of countries do it."
And he adds: "My dad was a pilot, and he took me to see planes fly at bases as a young kid, not to impress upon me their destructive capabilities, but at the skill required to pilot them."
I appreciate that your dad was a pilot and I know piloting takes amazing skill, but that seems to be a different issue from the military flying a warplane at a low altitude in a straight line over a peaceful St. Patrick's Day Parade. I just can't see that as anything but a show of military might reminiscent of how the Soviet Union used to parade its arsenal to cheering crowds.
From our parade story in today's paper: “If that doesn’t give you chills, nothing does,” parade co-chairman Gene Shaughnessy said, speaking of the flyover.
Chills. Yeah.
My dad was in the Navy. My brother was in the Marines.
But I'm with Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in this idiotic war. Yesterday she marched with thousands of war protesters near the Pentagon. “We’re here in the shadow of the war machine. It’s like being in the shadow of the death star. They take their death and destruction and they export it around the world. We need to shut it down.”
Gay marriage will have to be taken care of in the courts. Courts protect the rights of the individuals that come in front of them, even if the majority doesn't want those rights protected. And I'm afraid it will be decades before a majority of the public in any state is in favor of gay marriage.
We have to keep up the fight.
As you know, kc, I'm not a pacifist. But when I hear you talk about it, you make me wonder whether I'm wrong. I need to think hard about it. Thank you for talking about it.
I just read an article on how in several countries in Latin America there have been surprising gains in civil rights for gays in just the last few years.
There is, at most, an argument for those military flyovers for a 4th of July event. At least that is a national holiday that marks the origins of the country and the start of a war. But I am solidly against such displays for other events such as St. Patrick’s Day or sports events or graduations. I agree with kc that these are jingoistic productions that have nothing in common with the ideas of these other public ceremonies. Can’t we have a little more encouragement of civil society and a little less of war? And I also strongly defend the principle that obnoxious loud noises should never be inflicted on the public for the entertainment of a few.
Yeah, I agree that flyovers at events like St. Patrick's Day parades are gratuitous and fall outside the spirit of the event. I don't quite understand the rationale of adding a totally irrelevant military flyover to an event like that.
Do you think you would find flyovers less offensive in peacetime? If you didn't relate them to a war you oppose?
No, they would still bother me. First off, they will still be as noisy. But of more importance is their role in emphasizing the military as the preeminent foreign policy tool. The Bush administration, and Americans more generally, seem to have a greatly exaggerated belief in what can be achieved with military power. The war in Iraq is the starkest example of the failure of the military to achieve the desired results, but the problem isn’t just the long string of bad choices made in conducting this war. If you look at the numerous military interventions the U.S. has had in the last sixty years, very few of them had a positive outcome. This country would be better served by a smaller military and by much more modest expectations of what it can achieve. Low altitude flyovers by billion dollar warplanes will not help correct these expectations.
By the way, the Keillor column turned out to be a joke. He thought it would be obvious to everyone that he was satirizing homophobes.
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