found online by Raymond
From Jonathan Bernstein:
The restraint of a superpower was one of the ways in which America used to be great. Now a civic holiday is an occasion for self-aggrandizement.
Which gets to the very worst part of Trump’s Independence Day travesty: putting the military front and center in his vision of the United States. We’ve had altogether too much of this in every context over the last few years, which is pretty much what one would expect from a nation that has been at war for so long. But it’s just wrong for the Fourth of July, which has always been about freedom and democracy and which should be about politics at its best.
Nations that have nothing but military hardware to brag about center their celebrations on tanks and warplanes.