POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

The Atlantic’s weekly collection of news photos included one of the cadets graduating from the Air Force Academy. It prompted me to look for a fuller selection of photos of the ceremony. I know that the anything military is going to be more regimented than a civilian equivalent, but this just doesn’t look at all celebratory.

 

In addition to the very geometric seating, the commencement address was delivered by the vice president. Although I have not been able to find any commentaries on his remarks, I have been watching him during the nightly briefings of the White House coronavirus task force, and I cannot imagine that after his remarks, the cadets had to fight back the impulse to throw their hats in the air.

This is the photo that accompanied the official press release sent out ahead of the event.

Apparently, the president is going to address this year’s West Point graduates at a ceremony that has been pushed back to June 13 to enable him to speak.

Here are some excerpts from an article about the arrangements written by J. Edward Moreno for The Hill:

According to The New York Times, officials at the military academy had not yet finalized plans for the graduation ceremony when Trump announced last Saturday he would be speaking there.

Trump’s announcement has led the school to summon 1,000 cadets back to campus amid shutdowns and domestic travel restrictions. The graduation was originally scheduled for May 23 and moved to June 13.

“He’s the commander in chief, that’s his call,” Sue Fulton, a West Point graduate and former chairwoman of the academy’s Board of Visitors, told the Times. “Cadets are certainly excited about the opportunity to have something like the classic graduation, standing together, flinging their hats in the air.”

“But everyone is leery about bringing 1,000 cadets into the New York metropolitan area for a ceremony,” she added to the newspaper. “It’s definitely a risk.”

White House officials maintained that it had been a longstanding plan for Trump to address students in a commencement speech in late May and that the president had left it up to the school to decide whether it was safe to move ahead with a graduation ceremony in June.

Beyond the article’s more broadly providing yet another illustration of the inability of the White House to deliver even the most basic message coherently, the last sentence of the third paragraph does not seem at all coherent with the rest: if they are worried about simply bringing the cadets back to West Point, how likely is it that the cadets are going to stand “together” in anything beyond the most figurative sense?

I was going to add that “flinging their hats in the air” is only going to work if everyone simply tosses them lightly forward to the middle of his or her assigned square. But then I came across this photo:

Doesn’t someone’s having to gather up the hats—never mind the cadets having to retrieve their own hats—pretty much cancel out the whole point of the squares?

But maybe things will be much better in the middle of June. (I’m not holding my breath on that, but I don’t want to be accused of being a glass-half-empty kind of guy. Instead, I’ll settle for being labeled a mixed-metaphor kind of guy.)

J. Edward Moreno’s complete article is available at: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494630-trump-commencement-speech-bringing-1000-cadets-back-to-west-point.

I believe that the photos of the commencement were taken by Michael Ciaglo for Getty Images, but I cannot seem to relocate one of them.