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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSome thoughts about why trump's grand parade failed...
One big problem the US has when envisioning shit like the parade Saturday is the architecture.
The US doesn't have a big plaza like area with large buildings adjacent where the king/fuhrer can oversee the action. You watch the old videos and newsreels and you see that Hitler had his huge plaza at Nuremburg where he held his annual party rallies, etc. Paris has the Champs Elysees. Mussolini had areas where he could do this.
European cities (and Asian ones too) have wide boulevards and large plazas suitable to such activities. There is Red Square in Moscow where the Party holds parades and such. N Korea has its area for this.
The US doesn't have architecture and street configurations that lend itself to big parades like that. We do OK on celebretory parades like ticker tapes in NYC, etc, but we've never built that kind of architecture here because we just don't do that. Autocrats have better facilities, partly because they are old, having been built to celebrate monarchies and empires, which we don't purport to want to be, except for the typical trumper I guess. Or they are custom built, like the field at Nuremburg and the N Korean one.
trump wants to have celebretory parades like the kings and emporers of old Europe could have. We don't have the architecture because that's not how we think. Hell, during the early days of our Republic, the President was often looked down on and disparaged.
We suck at that type of parade because we don't like them. In many ways, the way the parade turned out was more of a statement that "we don't have kings" than the hundreds of rallies that occured contemporaneously.

Irish_Dem
(71,089 posts)Knock down half of DC.
doc03
(37,955 posts)Irish_Dem
(71,089 posts)Besides the only statue in DC should be a Trump statue.
BOSSHOG
(42,818 posts)Demovictory9
(36,269 posts)We also watched on tv..it was a big deal.
Our pride in America has been destroyed by Trump and MAGA
rurallib
(63,817 posts)Tommy Carcetti
(43,979 posts)You see Red Square parades or parades in China or North Korea and they are these wide open plazas suited for large formations and multiple tanks and vehicles. And the vantage point is higher up, allowing cameras to look down from above to display all the pomp and circumstance.
On the other hand, Constitution Ave is not nearly that wide. The cameras were thus a lot lower, the formations were a lot smaller and basically you got one tank at a time.
Think of it like professional baseball.
If the military parades of seasoned authoritarian regimes like Russia, China and North Korea were like major league baseball, this was like minor league baseball.
Smaller ballparks, smaller crowds, and far less impressive of an atmosphere.