Of Processions and Power Dynamics

THE CRESCENT BAR PARADE is something that I only have memories of from adulthood*. Despite having spent probably 70% of my Independence Days there since about the age of 9, I never participated and I've only watched it a few times in my twenties.

There are themes each year and I can remember only two: "Fun in the Sun" and "Patriotism". These themes are established by means of a flier that gets passed out, I think, by volunteers in golf carts^*, at least a week before the event. I don't know how the themes are determined; the owners' association has a board, so it could be an act of the board, or it could be a committee appointed by the board, or it could be the bare declaration of some ad hoc group. Regardless, it ends up appearing in print and some number of participants pay very close attention to it, some give a sort of minimal nod to it by incorporating some apt element into their independently-conceived theme at the last minute and some simply ignore it. The participants are comprised of people who are at Crescent Bar, are seasoned enough to know about the parade and have kids. These are the only universal characteristics among those in the parade**.

As you've probably already noted, "Fun in the Sun" and "Patriotism" are themes of any 4th of July parade, which makes the committee's straight-faced selection of these as official themes of the CB parade kind of perplexing. More interesting is the fact that this kind of self-referentiality so permeates this parade that it is a kind of essential part of the event.

PEOPLE AT CRESCENT BAR have some things in common. I'll start by acknowledging that this kind of exercise of describing a group is always problematic; it's stereotyping. So in undertaking this description I am aware that this description will be imperfect and not strictly accurate, but I will aim to make it true.

People who own places at Crescent Bar are people who worked for what they have; they are probably better off than their parents were. Some of them own businesses. They buy their places, which range from low-six-figures to mid-six-figures in price, with cash, because financing is typically not available for a variety of reasons. Largely, their jobs are of a type that have regular hours and can be truly left behind for a weekend or an extended vacation.

They like leisure, in its strict sense. There are lots of activities available (golf, boating and swimming in pools, to name a few), but there is not a single organized activity to do there that cannot be done with a drink in hand. Some people sit around and read, but mostly they cruise around the island in golf cars or float around the river in boats, with a focus on socializing, eating and actively relaxing.

THE WORD PARADE comes from the Middle French pare, which comes from the Latin parere (to give birth to), which derives from the Greek porein, meaning to give or present. So that's how it was named. But If you look up the history of the act of parading, it seems to have a dual origin. Since there were armies, they've had to be organized and therefore march in formation and this phenomenon of a military march through a town appears to be the oldest form of the act of parading. It's no surprise, then, that in British English, the word parade is still reserved for the military sense; in the civilian context the word procession is more commonly used.

The origin of the act of parading that is less obvious to modern folks is probably the one with a slightly more recent origin: passion plays. The passion play is something that dates back at least as far as the 13th century and it's basically a reenactment of the trial, suffering and death of Christ. We know it now from the movie Mel Gibson made shortly before he was found wandering around in the street, fall-down drunk, menacing law enforcement and screaming about Jews. And the passion play hasn't really changed a lot between its origin and now, except in the early centuries it couldn't be reproduced on video and so it had to be brought around to the everyday people in like wagons. Since the purpose of the passion play was to spread the good word and draw people in to the faith, the wagons themselves were decorated with religious images and in some cases allowed the actors themselves to be seen, traveling in full stage-dress and striking some biblically-heroic pose. The passion play's mode of transportation was meant to be a moving spectacle in itself.

So the parade arose out of a desire to make a spectacle of the two major organs of power in the medieval world: the church and the king. The parade demonstrated the local monarch's*** ability to raise an army and the church's power to protect a soul.

THIS IS THE SEASON of parades in this country; probably every city and town has at least one during the summer months. I've gone to none of them, which doesn't represent a personal stand, but is important for establishing the experiential context in which I'm writing this essay. I cannot remember attending a parade, other than the CB Independence Day parade.

But there are two parades I've been confronted with, in some sense, in the past couple of months. One is the Solstice Parade in Fremont, which is essentially a bunch of people that you might expect to find in Fremont who strip down, cover themselves in body paint representing various fantasy, folklore and sort of vaguely pagan-ish themes, and dance or cycle their way through the streets of this north-end borough, to the delight of the all-ages of spectators, to the bemusement of local news anchors and to the chagrin of social conservatives.

Verily, each year the local news shows are aflicker with carefully-shot clips of the parade while the newscasters pun and spew double-entendres, wearing wry and tolerant smiles. On the other hand, two of my socially-conservative friends spent a couple of days fretting over the exposure of children to nudity, the law-thwarting nature of the event and the general hippie-dippy, non-climate-change-denying, bumper-stickers-on-the-Prius atmosphere of the procession.

The thing is, there's every reason to believe the paraders know this and quite seriously crave those reactions. There are plenty of opportunities to be nude around like-minded people and there's no reason to think that everyone in the procession is a real-type exhibitionist. The point of the parade is to freak out the squares. It's a display of power in that the painted cyclists know that what they are doing is technically illegal and truly obnoxious to thousands of people and yet the traditional power structure can do nothing about it.

Likewise, the Gay Pride parade is a fiery affront to pretty much the same people that cringe at the thought of the Solsticers; that is to say, socially-conservative fellow Americans. The crowd loves the show and the paraders are having fun and so it has independent utility, but the purpose inherent in the parade and the fact of naming the whole succession of events Pride is knowingly getting under the skin of the retrograde-type squares and exercising power by demonstrating that, no matter how much they may hate them, they can't stop them.

The Pride Festival is a blast, in my opinion. Aside from being a congenital social liberal, I just plain had a great time hanging out up on the hill and drinking in the streets as one of a few token breeders in the 'mo maelstrom. Still, I didn't go to the parade, but for no other reason than I just wasn't that into it.

So I'll grant you that parades have all kinds of functions. But in their origins and in their DNA they are a show of power.

STILL, THERE IS NO power dynamic so obvious in the Crescent Bar Independence Day Parade. This year the theme announced was "Aloha", which is less redundant than themes past, but still somehow self-referential in that there is always a sort of ersatz tropical-vacation-island theme in lots of CB things. You can walk around the island and find Crescent Bar t-shirts for sale with stylized hibiscus-blossom motifs, tiki bars on decks, lots of the Tommy Bahama world of products, Margaritaville-brand drink blenders, et al.

The parade begins in a dusty, gravelly, potholed, unlined parking lot that curves between a public play field, complete with tennis courts, playground equipment and mobile agricultural-looking watering equipment, and a public beach, which is also the location of an unmanned station of the volunteer fire department. A typical morning at Crescent Bar is utterly windless, so that the backwater of the river behind the island is enamel smooth****** and the small light-green leaves of the trees are silent. Basalt cliffs rise improbably out of the water and stand 800 feet in the air to the east, so sunrise comes late. During breakfast and coffee the air can be very cool. At night, dew settles on the ground, but not until the island's one bar/restaurant has closed and almost everyone is asleep, excepting a few persistent revelers and maybe a few insomniac retirees. When the sun hovers up from the top of the cliffs, its motion visible to the eye, the temperature rises dramatically. By 10, when the parade begins, it is already starting to feel hot. Just in time, the grass has been burned free of moisture and is suitable for sitting.

Now the CB parade is ultimately a competition. There are prizes given out for entries in several categories, including best golf car, best trailer/float, best bike, &c. At the end of the event, when all the entrants regroup where they began, there are actual trophies handed out.



It might be helpful, in trying to understand the CB parade, to just go straight to an objective visual analysis of what you will see if you stay in one place along the parade route and just take account of what comes past. You will see a lot of vehicles: classic hobby cars, unbelievably-equipped golf cars^, powered childrens' cars, powered and unpowered Razor-brand scooters, fire trucks, personal watercraft^^, lots of bicycles, skateboards and a bunch of other vehicles that defy categorization altogether, which are often some sort of specialty hybrid of the above^^^. And what makes this abundance of vehicles remarkable is that, unlike a typical parade where the float is intended to obscure whatever engine and chassis is moving it (i.e. it is meant to obscure the mundane details of transporting the spectacle, which spectacle is the focus of the parade), all of the vehicles used at the CB parade are either an integral part of the spectacle or the purpose of the decorations. That is to say, in this parade the vehicle itself is primary to what you are intended to see.




The other single characteristic that predominates the parade is children. The presence of bunches of children isn't unique; it's sort of fundamental that children enjoy parades. But usually children are the spectators. This is not the case at CB, where the parade is actually full of children.



It's tempting to consider the presence of children on bikes, amidst cars and trucks, astride PWC on trailers, standing on improvised floats and otherwise participating in an amateur holiday parade to be generally fraught with risk of injury. But, with exceptions, that's not generally true. The typical way it's set up is that one parent is driving the vehicle or riding with the child and the other is trailing, usually with a digital still/video camera ready to hand, and spotting the children; that is, to make sure the bike doesn't veer under a fire truck, the tiki-masked tot doesn't do a gainer off the truck bed and so on. So the event is well supervised and safer than you'd expect.

And so the parade is full of cars and vehicles and belongings that are all newly washed and sparkling in the July sun. And it's made up of the owners of the vehicles and their children, a lot of them, all beaming out at the spectators who are an awful lot like them, standing along the route and cheering them on. And there's the year's theme and there are the colors of the flag, and all of the variations of the stars-and-stripes motif, and the flag is of the country we all belong to and that belongs to all of us.

What the parade is about is what it is to be those people, everyday people who are trying to relax and find a respite while being surrounded by all of the things they have worked hard to populate their lives with: close family and consumables that offer common pleasure. It's all decorated with symbols that for them are touchstones of their lifestyle and its aims and those symbols are being celebrated in the context of a celebration of independence, which is to say freedom, which is for the people in the parade both the wellspring of, and the concept embodied by, all of the objects in the parade.

I THINK IT WOULD be very tempting for someone who lives in an urban setting, surrounded by people who are relatively young, who has likely lived in more than one part of the country and maybe already traveled abroad a fair amount, who is a consumer of a lot of media and pop culture and who is childless or has very young children, to sort of sneer at^^^^ or mock the CBID Parade. That would be a predictable and even normal response.

Leaving aside whether it serves any worthy ends to go into that kind of analysis, beyond serving the commentator's desire to show how uber-hip he or she is, I would posit that in the context of the CBIDP it's not fair. That's because this parade is not about the spectacle, although it shares that element with all parades. The parade is about very lived-in, everyday elements of the participants' lives.  It is this utter transparency that is the event's distinguishing characteristic.  Unlike the many other contemporary parades, it has no them audience. There are no distinctions made between spectator and participant. And so a criticism of the parade would be a criticism of certain lives.

But lives are not concepts. Lives are real and, because no human critic can be a true outsider, they are irreducibly complex.  So the only ultimately effective form of criticism is to embody an alternative and in so doing effect a criticism that is itself real, irreducible and sublimely significant.  Only that form of criticism serves a worthy end. 

Good luck to you.

*Not perfectly true; my friend and I drove somebody's golf car in one when we were about 13, with a dog in the back, but we didn't decorate the car or the dog and drove in it only because it was a chance to drive somebody's golf car, which at the age of 13 is a reason to do almost anything.
*^ Properly referred to as a golf car according to ANSI standard z130.1, since "carts" are not self-propelled.
 ** One might be tempted to add certain other characteristics (e.g. an utter lack of irony), but that kind of reductionism, although tempting, is not a verity.
*** It might be significant that from the 13th through at least the 16th century most kings were essentially local warlords and the peasants might see their land brought into and then expatriated from three or four political subdivisions in a single lifetime, which might have almost no impact on the peasants, who did not fight for the king, most soldiers being foreign mercenaries.

****** Among Crescent Bar's raisons d'etre is its suitability for waterskiing and other water-planing sports. Two of the big-named companies for watersports equipment have their origins on the island.
^ This includes such things as four-seater carts, with seatbelts and four-speaker stereo systems, which are licensed and equipped to travel at speeds of 30 mph on public roads; this is not a joke.
^^On trailers, but sometimes with one or more riders.
^^^I.e. Bicycles without pedals that are propelled like a scooter, motorized skateboards, &c.; again, this is not a joke.
^^^^The setting is, after all, a family parade in what is, regardless of the price of the lots or the waterfront location or the other favorable elements, a trailer park.