Celebrating the New World Order: Festival and War in New York

Abstract

New York City's ticker-tape parades are messy events, always organized at the last minute because they celebrate the news of the moment in a theatre of popular memory, on a stage we call the Public Sphere. They always reenact parades of the past, celebrating heroism of an often, though not always, military sort. A New York ticker tape also reenacts a periocular civic ritual. It is the mayor's privilege to announce one-and the business community's privilege to step in and fund the festivities. They are synthetic festivals, miniature collective portraits of a city at a particular moment in history, heavily documented time capsules awaiting the scholar with an eye for state theatrics and invented traditions. Officially the city's celebration of and gratitude, ticker tapes have always depended on a consortium of private-sector power brokers for sponsorship. For the Gulf War, like the Super Bowl or the Olympics, the sponsor's audience was global. Looking back at the final act in the Gulf War trilogy, following Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the details of New York's welcome home ticker-tape parade remind us that war and the festival atmosphere within which war is waged are inseparable frames for analysis. There are several stories to be told concerning New York City and the 1991 43-day war in the Persian Gulf. One concerns the collaboration between the office of Mayor David Dinkins, an official commission appointed to organize the welcome home celebration, big business, the fashion industry, and the mass media-a choreography of public opinion in a dance of state aesthetics, patriotism, and public relations. Another story concerns American flags and yellow ribbons, shop windows, and front yards-spontaneous festive displays throughout the urban environment right down to patriotic extensions of the body itself. Both stories converged in June 1991 when many people felt an impulse to dress up and mask themselves, to form the crowd witnessing New York City's Operation Welcome Home parade. Both raise questions about the origins of homogeneity: the impulse of people to lose them-