The war on Memorial Day is a bit different, but no less insidious than our religious wars. We're long since used to being chastised for our lack of piety in not spending the event in self flagellation and the worship of the American messianic mission that some would pass off as appreciation for those who have died in Military service. We've never been asked however, at least not to my knowledge, to express our ritualized regret for the premature deaths of the 60 to 70 million who died in WW II alone, but only for the US soldiers who won it without assistance from the unappreciative world -- and I've long suspected that the War on Memorial Day has become the sole reason for the holiday itself.
If it were an expression of the wish that no more people would die in wars, it would be more likely to please the dead, could they be aware of it, but what it is supposed to be about has been, at least to those who write viral e-mails, a celebration of soldiering; the glory, the rituals and all the self worship and vainglorious bluster America can muster. It's the day of unmitigated, unalloyed arrogance, unrestrained by fact or reason and often not even by sanity or decency.
Of course in these latter days, when we have a President whose rationality and lack of shamanistic display require that we simply make shit up in order to preserve our military/religious complex, the War on Memorial Day is become the war that is Memorial day. It's now a war against Obama and Obama's honest assessment of what we have done, what we are doing and what we should do beyond waving flags, setting ourselves up as the world's sole and only begotten savior, puking up beer and burgers and getting discounts on foreign made goods at the big box stores.
Apologize for what? asks the e-mail. What follows is a sequence of pictures of US military cemeteries in Europe all entitled "We apologize." It ends with
"Apologize to no one. Remind those of our sacrifice and don't confuse arrogance with leadership. And we have to watch an American elected leader who apologizes to Europe and the Middle East that our country is "arrogant"! HOW MANY FRENCH, DUTCH, ITALIANS, BELGIANS AND BRITS ARE BURIED ON OUR SOIL, DEFENDING US AGAINST OUR ENEMIES?? WE DON'T ASK FOR PRAISE ... BUT WE HAVE ABSOULUTELY [sic] NO NEED TO APOLOGIZE!!"
No, it's not just the typical American arrogance about the world needing to kiss our feet every day. It's not just an illustration of our stunning ignorance of history, it's just another rabble rousing attack on a president who had the honesty to say that we have often of late been perceived as arrogant and we've often been unfair to those who disagree and that others have likewise been unfair to us. It's actually one of the best things Obama has said, in my opinion, and they're not going to let him get way with such heresy; not while there remains one pitchfork wielding and furiously ignorant psycho-patriot to arouse.
American Patriotism is a large and dense forest in which more scoundrels than we can count have taken refuge. I'm afraid there isn't enough Agent Orange and enough napalm to force them out or do away with them. I'm afraid that soon enough, Memorial Day will be the day some of use remember that there used to be an America that stood for something; something that contained a lot of good before the bastards flushed it down the toilet.
I've never thought of Memorial Day as an objectionable holiday – I haven't observed the ultrapatriotic nonsense to which Capt. Fogg alludes. Stupid television commercials turn everything into a sales event, no doubt, and I'm sure the good people at Faux will be churning out the propaganda as always. But mostly it's just been a day of quiet reflection for millions of people, so far as I can tell. I've visited a few of the country's war monuments (namely the Wall for Vietnam Vets and Arlington National Cemetery) and found it a moving experience, though not uplifting in any unmixed way: many of the graves one sees mark a life cut short – very short. Most people who die in wars are in their twenties or thirties. We shouldn't need Nietzsche or Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen to remind us that "civilization" proceeds by way of selective but ruthless acts of forgetting – forgetting, that is, of the terror, injustice, and violent sacrifice that went into its making. See, for instance, Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est."
ReplyDeleteOwen's memories aren't what the war lovers want you to remember and America has been in love with war these last 65 years.
ReplyDeleteIn the real world, I think the holiday is as you say, but in the other real world, the Fox World, the Limbaugh world it's only another front in their war. OHMAGOD Obama didn't tell the world to kiss American ASS!
You're lucky if you're not on the e-mail lists I seem to be on, but they exist and nothing sacred or profane avoids being infected with this Republican disease and passed on and on again.
Anything to smear Obama. Anything to smear the heretics - anything - anything at all.
“Non dulce non et decor" also recalls
ReplyDeletethis poem by Ezra Pound (IV and V):
“There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.”
About my generation’s response to an unjust war, there were street protests and anti-war marches and body counts reported every night on the evening news along with videotaped images of flag-draped caskets.
But what of the Iraq war and how the Bush/Cheney administration manipulated public opinion? They gave us the Orwellian term, Free Speech Zones, where protests took place NOT in full press view but sequestered … out sight, out of mind. They banned images of returning caskets and denied bereaving families a public validation of their losses. They suppressed all reminders of war that inform our public consciousness.
How can we feel our tragedies if we can't bear witness to them? Our government sanitized us into senselessness.
"Our government sanitized us into senselessness."
ReplyDeleteWe made it all too easy for them. Our "anti-government" tribe is really all about submission after all.