Parade of Human Oddities

Parades of national magnitude are precisely meant to match up to the accumulated interests and expectations of their collective audience. In this case the latter potentially spans over three generations, thus spreading across a whole range of progressively different hopes and dreams along with it. Imagine the initial reluctance to witness this smudge of human aspiration; this cohesive glue that smears red and white across our faces, congregating annually for a grand duration of two hours and willingly subjected to what I call a "symbolism squeeze"...an endless cacophany of music, rapid array of images and choreographed manoeuvres which portend to condense the decades into a creamy soup, altogether served with rhetorical toppings. Utensils, however, are not provided, for that would be too much of a crutch for the chef's liking. Can such an intense surge of representations really codify and breathe new interpretative potential into our collective consciousness? Will delightful dances and melodies bore a hole through our insensitivities and disconnectedness with whatever meagre history we possess? Do we define courage, fortitude, love and kinship along prescriptive lines characterised by temporal doses of emotional medicine? Should children frolicking in fish costumes and the frailty of elders guarding flags in the wind signify anything beyond phyrric merriment? Perhaps the unlike-minded; the carcasses whose blood have gone cold; the argument-churning-but-otherwise-inane individuals can never comprehend, nor will ever want to.