Friday, June 21, 2002
I Love A Parade
Last weekend, South Bend celebrated the event formerly known as the Ethnic Festival. For me, the highlight was the festival parade, which we viewed towards the end of its route, just before School Field. Some of the youngsters were flagging, and a few outfits were a bit awry. But still, it was a fine spectacle of local civic life on a sunny Michiana morning.
There were high-school marching bands and baton twirlers, singing Brownies on foot and media personalities in a Humvee. A team of Shriners with headsets clipped to their fezzes executed precision manoeuvres on shiny red scooters. A few minutes later, a Sunday-school drill team in patriotic red white and blue marched past, calling out Old Testament verses in response to their leader’s challenge, “Genesis 1:3?”. Members of a local chiropractic firm each carried a large, papier-mâché vertebra, and walked in perfect alignment to form a goliath spinal column. The Farmer’s Market decorated a float in astroturf and plastic produce; and the Scouts had pitched a tent on a flatbed truck among bales of hay. It was an eclectic display, as Commerce marched with Religion, and Philanthropy scooted alongside Politics.
Having just returned from England and the brouhaha over the Golden Jubilee, an extravaganza to mark the 50 year-reign of Queen Elizabeth II, I found myself comparing two parades, on opposite sides of the Pond. The Queen’s Jubilee procession from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral was ordered by ancient precedent and protocol as strict as the Soviet Nomenklatura. Floats in South Bend’s Summer parade followed no obvious sequence except, perhaps, that the local political wannabes were closely succeeded by the city street sweepers. In England, there was but one Queen, one golden coach in the procession: in South Bend, I counted at least three queens, each with her own convertible and sequined retinue. And I bet the Blueberry Queen 2002 didn’t inherit her tiara. Still, both events called people onto the city streets, to rub elbows with strangers in the crowd enjoying a shared, neighbourly celebration.
It’s increasingly unusual to find ourselves face to face with strangers, as we jump in our SUVs to pick up a DVD to play in the privacy of our own homes. In this context, community celebrations take on an unexpected political importance. Some cyber-advocates pin their hopes for American democracy on the internet as the public forum of the future. In that virtual space, they reason, we will mingle and converse freely, unprejudiced by knowing each others’ class, skin colour or sex. But tolerance in a pluralistic democracy is not just a disembodied intellectual operation. It matters, too, how we move and react when we encounter others in the flesh, who are marked as different from us, whether by the way they walk, or the banners they carry. So a peaceful community parade of many different groups strikes me as a hopeful enactment of the democratic ideal of unity in diversity.
Of course, I am romanticising. No doubt some of the smiles and waves from the sidewalks were based on onlookers not recognising that pretty rainbow flag as the symbol of Gay Pride, bravely carried by a few marchers and their children. Perhaps some were angered by the very presence in the parade of Palestinian flags carried by a group proclaiming “Palestinians for Peace.” But the irreducible fact remains, a moment of practical tolerance was accomplished, as so many different groups were accorded a place in the American parade.