Two Saturdays before the Kentucky Derby draws 150,000 well-heeled men and women to America’s most famous horse race, five times as large a crowd, diverse too, lines the Kentucky and Indiana banks of the Ohio River for North America’s largest annual airshow and fireworks display. 

Two days before this year’s, a friendly neighbor asked, “Going to Thunder over Louisville, Russ?” My smart-ass reply was rhetorical—“No, how many of the thousands will consider thunder over Tehran?”—but his puzzled look led me to clarify my antipathy to military prowess parading as family fun.

The annual spectacle includes civilian daredevils whose nimble aircraft, often decommissioned from the Navy or Air Force, maneuver through choregraphedloops, rolls, spins, and climbs. Aeronautical stunts and engineering mastery meld with look-at-me bravado. Aircraft occasionally emit red, white, and blue smoke to underscore Thunder’s patriotic patina.

Promoting Thunder on local tv, Producer Wayne Hettinger revealed, “Our concern this year was losing aircraft because of what is building up in Iran. There’s a lot of [aircraft] that have been called, but we’ve lost very few from our lineup.” 

In the grand tradition of show biz pretense, the show must go on—even if we are engaged in very real war. The narration broadcast by a local radio station all day, plus a synchronized soundtrack for drones and fireworks at night, lull the crowd into make-believe cocoons as if a Broadway musical were regaling them. Live action too. Whoopee!

Thunder’s all-star cast includes Air National Guard from Kentucky, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Fighter jets elicit “oohs” and “ahhs” from groundlings. These include the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which maneuvers so sharply at high speed that top guns in the cockpit, strutting their stuff while executing four-point rolls, experience 9Gs, i.e. nine times the normal force of gravity. Wow! 

Still niftier is the F-35 Lightning. Its manufacturer boasts, “as the most lethal, survivable, and connected fighter aircraft for America and its allies, it acts as the quarterback of the skies.” How cool is that for a cozy afternoon! 

Most moms, dads, kids, and cousins enjoying the show know nothing of President Eisenhower’s final address, in 1961, when this West Point grad and retired general warned the nation, on live tv from the Oval Office, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

The defense industry advertising of Thunder is implicit, silent like the cost to taxpayer chumps of each F-35: $82,000,000-$109,000,000. We own about 500. Equally unspoken is the sway of companies whose sales are an invisible bedrock of the extravaganza: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing Defense, Space & Security, among others.

How many of my picnicking neighbors—proud of their wide-eyed boys and girls mouthing “gee whizz” at the entertainments above while drowning in knee-jerk patriotism below—take a single moment to consider families 6653 miles to the East?

Instead of our mighty jets eliciting glee, they force Iranians to duck and cover. One cruise missile—built by Raytheon @ $3,600,000 each—destroyed an elementary school in Minab and killed at least 125 children.

I have never been to Iran, let alone Tehran, but I have felt besieged by screaming jets—scary in Louisville but intimidating in Chicago where airshow rehearsals over Lake Shore Drive rattled my windows, and the racket echoed from high-rise to high-rise. A pilot in Louisville called such din “the sound of freedom.” His blithe sanitizing heightened the dread that I imagine Iranians experiencing in Tehran, a city larger than every American metropolis except New York.

Historically known as Persia, Iran’s civilization, among the world oldest, predates when Athens became the font of democracy and cradle of Western civilization. I wonder if any Iranians felt safe enough to guffaw at the absurdity and ignorance of our president’s threat, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” 

Precisely the same distance from Louisville—but West—is North Korea. Do families there sleep in relative peace because MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, protects them from attack? Such mutual threats did not exist in 1945 when Hiroshima, 520 miles from Pyongyang, was decimated. Nagasaki is a few miles closer. 

Israel, our Middle East ally, is the region’s only nuclear power, which it does not admit. Is it this “secret” that gives Israel cocksure license to attack Lebanon at will? Or make it feel certain Gazans cannot prevent another genocide?

I fear our leaders have been swallowed into a time warp that fantasizes our military showered with garlands and cheered by liberated strangers as children line victory parades to scramble for candy tossed by heroic G.I.s.

Few in Louisville know about Ike’s “military-industrial complex” let alone worry as he did. Still fewer know the cogent term coined by philosopher Duane Cady, warism: “an uncritical presumption in modern society that war is morally justifiable, even morally required.” Warism pervades the United States and is unquestioned, pervades because it is unquestioned, which Vice-President confirmed in “popeslaining” that the pontiff needed to be careful “when he talks about matters of theology.” Leo XIV had preached that Christ, the Prince of Peace, rejected war.

Airshows like Louisville’s will never appeal to doves like me, but I hope children exposed to a day of Talons, Osprey, Eagles, and Falcons, can still marvel with “gosh” and “wow” when backyard robins, sparrows, and hummingbirds fly over their heads or feed nearby. They might even aspire to “Imagine” and John Lennon’s, “nothing to kill or die for.”

Inspired by the 250th anniversary of the nation, Louisville’s planners broadened this year’s theme to “Thunder Over U.S.A.” That makes the hoopla, like war against Iran, sadder and more ironic. Both ignore our Declaration’s final words, a mutual pledge of “our sacred Honor.”

---