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POST-ironic PARADE theorY

Continued from Iggy Igloo's reply:

We are not all given superstar status, but in a parade, the Shriners are allowed an equal opportunity at attention as the giant Mickey Mouse ballon.

Neither attraction uses a bullhorn to solicit their messages explicitly: "Become a Freemason and join the New World Order; look at how much fun we're having" and "Disney is God; look at the cute little Giant mouse." However, the odds are pretty likely that the organization head did indeed have such an undermining purpose in mind...even if the participants just do it so they can ride a trike; or smile and wave and feel like a celebrity.

I have been in parades with Boy Scouts and as three kids riding their bikes with the TFMBRC (Twenty Five Mile Bike Ride Club); both times I think the crux of the biscuit was getting attention. In the first there was no need for me to create pretense because I had the safetey of a uniformed group. The second was more or less a declaration of independence, although it also relied heavily on the comfort of a group. I was either championing conformity or challenging it...but in both cases heavily dependent on it.

This leads me to question the actions of the Summer Snowmen. Cheerily cynical in free conformity as snowmen in heat enduring contradictions like weathered hippocrisy...the Summer Snowmen parade debut was awesome...but it was and is a work in progress. This is a good thing because it shows that the fundamental concept is strong enough to march on past 'a one time thing'...still, I wonder what your vision and purpose was when we got started, and how that has evolved. At the start of our first 'march/slide' we couldn't agree on how to act...what image to portray as a unified group. I believe we settled on a testosterone charged "We won the country(more or less)...hooray Summer Snowmen; let's run infiniti sign formations and run and slide down the naked street on a plastic sled while our commrades cheer us on to the victory of wearing winter appearal in 90 degree heat." That worked out well, and it earned us some trophies...but once the thrill of the external rewards wears off, we'll need a sound mission statement, or at least an un-written sense of purpose.

I'm not trying to manipulate the group unity and good times of parade participation for the sole purpose of advancing a clisched social-activist agenda...I just saw in what we were already doing, a trace of something bigger(un-premeditated perhaps). Perhaps storming through the parade as an obscure group of crazy kids is something in itself...but from the beginning you sounded like you wanted to treat this like a real organization that takes it's work seriously. I think that is what will make this great if we can pull it off, because then our differences from the other groups are not superficial...we'd have subtle substance and not so subtle sarcasm...?

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