Today being May Day makes me think about the marvelously lugubrious military parades the Soviets used to put on to remind the peoples of the USSR and the world that they really knew how to build arms.
I mean—it’s hard to choose between floats covered in flowers on 1 January and a gazillion attack tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers four months later.
This year the Muscovite parades were apparently divided between those wanting to bring back Stalin (really) and those denouncing Vladimir Putin as Stalin.
That would be the Russian paradox.
Elsewhere, Greeks were comparing the IMF to the military junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974. The IMF being the source of the bailout to the collapsed Greek economy that seems to be taking down other Euro dominoes like Portugal and Spain along with it.
The French are protesting rumors of plans to undermine their job security system (under which a lot of companies find it’s cheaper to keep people on the payroll than to sack them) and state pension plan (I won’t even go there).
The Turks are just out in the streets celebrating the fact that there aren’t whack-job countrymen out with automatic weapons mowing them down (as happened around 30 years ago).
The US saw hundreds of thousands swarming the streets across the country to protest Arizona’s crackbrained immigration law. (“Not racial profiling”? As bloody if—are they going to stop me looking like I just got off the plane from Dublin to take an underground job as an au pair ro raise funds for Noraid? They are not. They’re going to stop anyone who looks like he might have originated south of Nogales.)
And in DC the self-proclaimed guardians of the somehow-Christian faith clogged the area around the Lincoln memorial to—well, I’m not sure what they were doing. Perhaps protecting us from the hurricanes and earthquakes that are caused not by meteorological conditions or seismic shifts, but by failure to adhere to this or that sect’s tenets. You can see the web site that was promoting this here, but it’s mostly full of solicitations for donations and tee-shirts for sale, so I can’t really determine what it’s all about.
Except the all-important anti-abortion stance, which always seems to crop up in the events of groups like this.
Me—I really miss those Soviet parades. I’m sure this Stalin/anti-Stalin schizophrenia is progress, but those suckers really were spectacular, even in the pre-Internet days. I suppose they’re too expensive to put on these days, it's hard to find the soldiers in impressive numbers, much less the mobile rocket launchers, and it’s much easier to expose their broadcasts as artfully edited propaganda pieces. (It’s not enough that you’ve got two hours of tanks going past? You have to loop the film to look like there are five hours?)
Anyhow—workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
And your retirement plans.
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