Why are many happy to see F-35 fighter jets stream overhead but disgusted by the sight of tanks on transport pallets?
Both F-35 jets and M1A2 Abrams tanks are slated to appear at President Trump’s Independence Day celebration in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. But while many don’t seem to have ever had much of a problem with U.S. military jets overflying sports games and parades, a good number seem very upset with that tanks are coming to town. Consider Laurence Tribe.
The resemblance to days before Tiananmen Square is chilling. https://t.co/cFJJZzL4F7
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) July 2, 2019
There’s a foul silliness in comparing U.S. military patriots to communist totalitarian zealots, Still, the tank fixation is odd.
Yes, it could be said that stationing tanks around the Lincoln Memorial is an unusually gauche riposte to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg call to use war for a better peace: for “us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” But it’s interesting that so many are happy to see weapons of war overfly our capital yet so sad to see weapons of war appear on its soil. A recent F-35 flypast over Washington had many presumably liberal residents excitedly out on their roofs and few complaining on Twitter.
But while the F-35 might look and sound cooler flying through the air, it really isn’t that different to the Abrams tank. Both are weapons designed to kill. The only difference is that where the Abrams tank exists to kill enemy combat forces on the ground, the F-35 exists to kill enemies in the air and in their command centers. But killing is certainly the shared object.
So if nothing else, let’s stop pretending that a couple of tanks in plain sight beckons fascism.
