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August 28, 2013

Parading for Parody

Dear Parodists:

I've quoted before Karl Marx's emendation of Hegel's dictum, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, comments similarly on the festivities of the reenactment of the March on Washington both Saturday and Wednesday: "Check out Variety’s Coverage of the March on Washington [http://tinyurl.com/nv2sx3h]. The real one from fifty years ago, not the pathetic Jackson/Sharpton parody of today." The distinction is that the first March, fifty years ago, had the aim of bringing together, uniting, and healing the nation; and the organizers of the March believed that the American dream, Martin Luther King's dream, could and would be realized. The organizers of this week's March don't believe in the dream, and only as a reluctant afterthought will they admit that America has made any progress in race relations over the past fifty years. How do you celebrate the success of a great and noble event that you believe was actually a failure, when you constantly proclaim that racism is as bad today as it was then? And how do you heal America when your aim is to use the fading memory of the March to divide Americans and promote a partisan political agenda?

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Washington, having built or planned to build every imaginable specialized sports stadium — the soccer stadium will be used for a grand total of seventeen home games a year, and you can't build an auditorium for a smaller or more specialized audience than that — now fantasizes that the path to riches lies through a bid to host the Olympics games. Our city fathers normally jump at every opportunity to transfer money from city taxpayers to sports promoters, but Mayor Vincent Gray has actually expressed some reservations about the Olympics idea. He says it has to be weighed against other economic opportunities. Since every city that hosts the Olympics loses billions, nearly every other economic opportunity would be better, even taking into account our administration's and city council's incompetence at economic development projects. You can bet that promoters of the Olympics will also jump on board to promote the soccer stadium, but where would they build an Olympics village? At Buzzard’s Point, through eminent domain?

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com

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