Parades – What’s Not to Like?

I was Actually in this one - I'm standing at Base of Right Flagpole - Yellow Striped Pants

I wrote yesterday about the love I have for parades in general.  I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire where parades took place regularly, Memorial Day, 4^th of July, Veterans Day, a Fireman’s Parade and a couple of others that I can’t recall.  What I can recall are the feelings these parades elicited from a young boy.  Some of best memories I have are of watching these parades make their way through the main streets of my hometown.  I can clearly remember a huge sense of pride when I saw my father, a Cub Scout leader, break ranks from the parade and wave to me.  I think I committed at that time to becoming a cub and then Boy Scout, if for no other reason than it would allow me to march next to my dad in a parade.  That never happened because for some reason he left scouting by the time I was of an age to start, never quite figured that out.  I do remember the biggest highlight of any parade for me was when the Soldiers marched by.  I guess the cosmos was trying to tell me where I was headed but I thought the Soldiers were the coolest thing by far in any parade.  I still remember seeing my first tank in a parade in a different town, it tore the hell out of the pavement – which to a seven year old kid was just simply awesome.  My generation was raised by the survivors of World War 2 and the most popular game I played as a kid was called Army where we would split into two warring factions with our toy guns and stalk each other.  I’m sure political correctness or video games have replaced that tendency.  In the long decades since that childhood I have marched in countless parades, including two presidential inaugural parades.  I have pretty much tapped out the well of actual participation; it is definitely a spectator sport for me now.  For that reason I bemoaned the coverage of parades offered to the television audience.  It has gone the same way as coverage of the Olympics and many other sports.  The announcers talk --- all --- the --- time.  They cut away from the actual parade to give us innumerable background, usually aimed at heartwarming, stories.  This first started when NBC began broadcasting the Olympics and seems to have become the paradigm for coverage.   Two other channels had promised commercial free coverage of the parades but they were mysteriously blocked by the cable company when the broadcast channels had the parade on, hmmm.  It’s almost as if they think we’re tuning in to watch these clever stories and listen to the “trying to make a name for him/herself” announcer (thanks Chris Berman for that) instead of the actual event.  There were a couple of marching units approaching (yes, one of them was bagpipes) when they cut away for some nonsensical story about a band mopping floors to make it to the parade and then John Naber (personal hero of my youth whom I actually met – but I digress) was telling us about the guy in charge of dispatching the marching units.  We end up missing a large percentage of the parade because of these antics, yes, including the bagpipe band, damn it.  My brother in law, a member of the sports media, laughs when I hold forth on the descent of sports coverage into this miasma.  He says, they know you’re going to watch anyway, they’re going after people who wouldn’t watch without this garbage.  Well they’ve gone too far.  I’m voting with my absence.  I still love parades though!