This morning Nancy and I had a really fun time going down to watch our fourth annual Fourth of July parade. It was a blast, and for quite a number of reasons. Thousands of people turned out, and the parade entries were just one motorized slab of Americana after another. It was just the right kind of rowdy event—balloons, bubble machines, and boatloads of candy thrown to the kids.
As just mentioned, it has only been going for four years, which means that it is one of the developments in the aftermath of the COVID hysterics—an episode which constituted a hard reset for quite a few Americans. The volunteers who have made this event the event that it is right now have done a remarkable service for our entire community. This was clearly the largest of the four to date, and I think that it is now an event that officially needs to happen next year.
I have just one takeaway observation. This was an event of the normies, by the normies, and for the normies. The floats were hosted by medical services, realtors, a rugby club, the sheriff’s department, local businesses, and so on. Just a lot of regular people having fun. It was not a parade for ideologues—this was just a lot of people who love their country. A right wing cynic might say, “their country, what’s left of it.” A left wing ideologue would want to kick off the parade with a land acknowledgement to the Nez Perce. But what is going to do some actual good will be a revolution from the middle.
So the takeaway is this. When normies organize themselves into any kind of preference cascade, they are powerful enough to ignore ideological griping from the purists, right or left, or perhaps simply to take their complaints and fold them into the celebrations. This is what I mean. One of great features of this parade was that at the center of the parade route, some hefty speakers were set up and a great playlist was blasting the crowd throughout. They were almost all upbeat rock and country. Some of them even had lyrics that were relevant to the day, some were just fun songs, and others were cynical boomer gripes about America from back in the day. You know, Fortunate Son by CCR, songs like that.
But the one that made me think of this point was Born in the USA by Springsteen. That song has some of the saddest, cynical lyrics you might find anywhere. “Had a brother at Khe Sahn/Fighting off them Viet Cong/They’re still there, he’s all gone.” And here it was, pelting the most cheerful crowd imaginable. And I thought something like, “Goodness. We’ve digested Springsteen.”