So On and So Fourth

*Updated below.

To the chagrin of thousands if not millions of Rod Serling junkies, the SyFy Channel cruelly nixed its annual Twilight Zone Fourth of July marathon last year.

 So somebody has to fill the patriotic holiday TV vacuum, right? And that somebody turns out to be none other than Showman-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump. As Daughter of the United States (DOTUS) Ivanka might say, "It's totally surreal!"

So in lieu of time travel and cheesy flying saucers and the Monsters Coming to Maple Street, all manner of military bombers and jets and helicopters will darken the skies over D.C. on Thursday evening. There will even be a few tanks on display on the National Mall to thrill the ticket-holders, not to mention regaling those stuck in their houses in the throes of Twilight Zone withdrawal. C-Span coverage of Trump's horror show should hopefully tide them over.

Sadly, not even the SyFy Channel will be airing this true-life frightening event. As a matter of fact, only Fox News will join C-Span in the wall-to-wall coverage. Both MSNBC and CNN say they will adhere to their previous scheduled programming of various talking heads sitting around a table bitching about Trump and bragging about their own righteously indignant decisions to replay only the most gruesome "highlights" of his Fourth of July show. Heaven forbid that they collude with Trumpian authoritarian narcissism on this sacred day of all days. They already do enough colluding with his authoritarian narcissism on the other 364 days, or whenever he holds a Nuremberg-style campaign rally in some flyover city that they themselves would never live in, let along visit other than to cover a Trump event or a tornado. 

There are, let's face it, already more than enough displays of hideous military might on American TV screens. Tune in to any of the cable Sunday shows, and at least one of the sponsors is bound to be a branch of the military or the manufacturer of the same kinds of death machines which will so distastefully and outrageously fly over Washington on the Fourth of July.

But for some reason, Recruiter-in-Chief Trump's own Independence Day theatrics are giving all good war-mongers and true some serious conniption fits.

 The Best and the Brightest are not used to death machines flying directly over their own hallowed democratic institutions and gated communities and manicured lawns in the greater D.C. area, the wealthiest per capita section of real estate in the entire United States.  

And speaking of grass, they're suddenly all concerned about parks. They're bitching about the obscene cost of the Trump Show - more than $2.5 million of it allegedly coming from National Park funds, which would be better spent improving and cleaning the parks. These are the same critics who don't ever bat an eye at the trillion-odd dollars spent every single year on the death machines so grotesquely being put on public display on one nightmarish night for the whole world to see. They prefer that their death machines operate far, far away where American citizens don't get to see them actually killing innocent people.

The Guardian newspaper is typical of the corporate media-political class outrage over Trump's Fourth of July apostasy:

The event takes place in a politically hostile environment: Hillary Clinton took more than 90% of the vote in the District of Columbia in the 2016 election, whereas Trump secured just 4.1%. The Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue is one of the few outposts in the capital where his supporters are conspicuous. 

And for decades, presidents have kept a low profile during Washington’s annual celebration of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, as typically hundreds of thousands of people gather at the National Mall for a nonpartisan concert and fireworks.

 But ever the disrupter, Trump its putting himself centre stage this year. He tweeted on Tuesday: “Big 4th of July in D.C. ‘Salute to America.’ The Pentagon & our great Military Leaders are thrilled to be doing this & showing to the American people, among other things, the strongest and most advanced Military anywhere in the World. Incredible Flyovers & biggest ever Fireworks!”

Trump is egregiously not only creating his own Christmas in July, he is trying to create his own Super Bowl in July. It is an unprecedented breach of protocol the likes of which the Military Industrial Complex has never seen. 

 You see, besides waging never-ending wars, it has only been at violent corporate sporting events that the United States Military has regularly performed such public displays of authoritarian, nationalistic strength. 

Maybe (besides aspiring to be Hitler) Donald Trump is simply getting back at Professional Football. Not only was he prevented from buying his own team several years ago, his constant harangues at football players who refuse to stand for the National Anthem have been greeted with derision. So if professional football players disrespect both him and the flag, his Fourth of July stunt might his way of dissing them right back. 

Speaking of the spending of public money on war propaganda, a little scandal erupted with news that an estimated $10 million in taxpayer money had been paid out by the Obama Defense Department between 2011 and 2015 to 14 National League teams simply to "put on elaborate patriotic salutes to the military."

As Think Progress reported, Trump's criticism of players who "take a knee" during the playing of the National Anthem is really an unwitting defense of a policy put in place during the Obama administration, which importuned players to take part in jingoistic salutes to the flag and other propaganda events honoring the troops and the armed forces. The whole point of the militarization of football games via this "paid patriotism" was to recruit more young people to join an ever more depleted and exhausted all-volunteer military.

The year before Trump won election, and as a result of Congressional oversight, the NFL announced it would be ending its war marketing programs and returning a token $724,000 of the Pentagon payout money it had pocketed for staging blatant recruiting drives during games and using its athletes to do so.

But the National Anthems and the marching military bands and the elaborate flyovers at the Super Bowl itself still remain time-honored traditions. As the U.S. Air Force bragged in a press release for this year's earsplitting performance:

“Supporting this event is a tremendous honor for the team and the U.S. Air Force,” said Lt. Col. John Caldwell, Thunderbirds commander and leader. “We look forward to showcasing the pride, precision and professionalism of our nation’s 660,000 Total Force Airmen to football fans around the world.”

 The Thunderbirds’ flyover, its first public event in 2019, will feature six F-16 Fighting Falcons, soaring over the Mercedes-Benz Stadium at the moment the final notes of The Star Spangled Banner are sung. They will take off for the Super Bowl LIII flyover from Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Marietta, Georgia.

The Thunderbirds last flew over the Super Bowl in 2017 at the NRG Stadium, Houston.

 The Thunderbirds’ team is composed of eight pilots, four support officers, 120 enlisted Airmen and three civilians serving in 28 Air Force job specialties. In 2019, the Thunderbirds are scheduled to perform at 65 air shows in 33 different locations all over the world.

Since the unit’s inception in 1953, more than 300 million people in all 50 states and 60 countries have witnessed the distinctive red, white and blue jets in thousands of official aerial demonstrations.

Here's the performance, in case you missed it. You probably also missed the mass outcries expressing the nation's horror and outrage at this shameful example of aggressive American exceptionalism. Because there were none. On the contrary - it is the media's task to relentlessly hype this kind of patriotic horror and do their part to recruit more troops before they profit from showcasing them in their wheelchairs and caskets:

And it's not just at football games that the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps perform flyovers to encourage more sports fans to enlist to serve in the nation's endless wars.They're also doing their stunts at Major League Baseball games, at college games and, most disgusting of all, even at Little League season openers.

New rules now allow up to four aircraft at a time to perform at each standard sporting event flyover, while limits on ground equipment displays have been virtually abolished. 

These flyovers, of course, are expensive. But the military actually justifies the costs by claiming that the promotional spectacles are all part of the pilots' training experience. Better to fly over the bodies of thousands of people where everybody can watch you learning your craft than to practice your skills lonely and unseen and unsung above unpopulated deserts and bodies of water. 

Current estimates are that the military honors at least 850 flyover requests from sports groups each year, at varying costs. A seconds-long six-plane flyover for six F/A-18A jets from the Navy's Blue Angels squadron, for example, runs taxpayers about $36,000.

So while it's gross and it's self-serving, let's put Donald Trump's fascistic Fourth of July extravaganza into some perspective. He's glorifying himself, of course, but he's also just simply horning in on the lucrative corporate war machine which has been so profitable for so few and so deadly to so many.

Maybe enough people will be so turned off by his shameless narcissism that they won't immediately rush out to their nearest military recruiting office to enlist after watching the flyovers and listening to his jingoistic rants. That distinct possibility is probably what's really riling up the war profiteers, the neocons, the liberal interventionists and the media sycophants.

Trump makes war look tawdry and ugly and disgusting. Tanks a lot, Trump!


*Update, 7/5. For those who missed his speech, Trump at least got into the true spirit of The Twilight Zone's time-travel episodes when he snort-bellowed these words:

"In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified Army out of the Revolutionary Forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, commander in chief. The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. 

"Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant."

Trump could have been riffing off any number of classic Twilight Zone plots. There's the classic episode about the airplane that entered a time warp and passengers saw dinosaurs where La Guardia Airport should have been. And then there was the one about the guy who went back in time and tried to warn everybody about historical catastrophes. But the best comparison between Trump's addled revisionist history might be to "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville," which features a bored corrupt millionaire who literally gets stuck in a past that never existed except within his own warped mind. Judging from the amount of loud sniffling he did during his tirade, could Trump have hit the cocaine before taking up position in front of the Lincoln Memorial?

Colonel Bone Spurs had to have been on something to actually stick to his script and summon up the chutzpah to urge people to join the same military he had so studiously avoided during his Vietnam-era youth. As it was, his bleary image behind rain soaked bullet proof glass made him look like a crazy old coot who'd forgotten to take his clothes off before hitting the shower and performing his spittle-inflected ode to bloody American Exceptionalism. At least he didn't sing.