It's Memorial Day weekend again in the New South. It's nice to know they've finally accepted a holiday they once loathed. Of course it was Decoration Day until 1968 and after I was grown and had a family. It was as you know, about decorating the graves of Union Soldiers and after the next horror of the Great War, the graves of the 117,465 American dead: a day of solemn reflection.
But by the time they changed it to Memorial Day to make it more compatible with our imperialism at the height of the senseless horror in Vietnam, it was about Dad's cremated Hamburgers and Indy; parades and patriotic hoo-ha, but perhaps it's because I now live in the South, it's taken on a new tone. Perhaps too, it's because I live in an area flooded with retired military folks filled with their own importance and those employed by the notorious Military- Industrial Complex -- but my in-box is once again flooded with glorious stories about our glorious military and the glorious things they do. A good part of them are hoaxes and of course there are no mentions of our heroes of My Ly 4 or Abu Ghraib or of the recent glorious heroes who accidentally slaughtered 30 or so civilians using robot planes in air conditioned comfort from halfway around the world.
No, what I get are bogus stories about Marines rescuing babies on 9/11/01 and how it is the Veterans" we owe our freedom of religion, press, speech and the rest of the rights we've had abridged because of the martial spirit of the times -- not the constitution, the courts or the Government of the United States.
Have we forgotten that the biggest enemy of freedom on this continent was the American South? Was anything we can call our own freedom at risk in most of our wars? Andrew Jackson's slaughter and deportation of the Seminoles? the use of Federal troops in slave raids into Florida? The Mexican War? The Spanish American War? The war against Philippine independence? What kind of threat to our freedom of speech necessitated suppressing free elections in Vietnam or the killing of two million civilians? What threat to our freedom of Religion was posed by Iraq? What threat were flower carrying kids in Ohio that they needed to be shot in the back by American troops? Were the troops driving armored vehicles down Chicago's State Street in 1968 there to support our right to assembly or to shut us up?
It' s not that I have any disrespect for veterans, living or dead, but our Constitution wasn't written by the Generals, no foreign power is any threat to it and that we still pay any attention to the Bill of Rights owes as much to the "activist" courts and the ACLU as to anything else. It owes nothing whatever to the Tea Bag flag wavers who hate government power unless it's carrying guns. It owes nothing to Macho flag wavers from John Wayne to Bomb-bomb McCain.
Memorial day has become an encomium not to dead soldiers; an expression not of profound grief. It's not a day when we mourn our losses or of any remembrance of the horror of war and militarism, but to celebrate living veterans, sing praise to the Armed forces and to the glory of war itself. It's a day we now use to decorate ourselves, congratulate ourselves on our military prowess and this in a country that's been fighting all my life but hasn't been on the winning side of a war since 1945. It's a day too often used to obscure the real threats to freedom with red white and blue bunting and it's good to remember that the same folks crowing about military defense of freedom are quite happy to require anyone with tan skin to carry proof of citizenship at all times, quite happy to give the local police the power of Federal Marshals and to forget all about warrants and probable cause. What army is going to protect us against our own smug racism, bigotry and expansionism?
We should be sitting among the graves at Alrington and other military cemetaries in sack cloth and ashes, crying for the loss of all those lives over men's greed and lust for power.
ReplyDeletePoignant post, Fogg, thank you.
Spot on, good post...no, great post. One that everyone should read. I am sure you will get some hate comments over this one.
ReplyDeleteFor me, this day is one of remembrance of those who were forced by their government to do something they didn't want to do, nor necessarily believed in, and it is even more poignant that many of them died. It is no less poignant to realize that we, as a nation, have blinders regards what we have been and done...and are still doing.
While the rest of the country may not act like they know what Memorial Day is about--at least, not the parts you refer to--THIS family does. Perhaps that's because we're what you'd probably call a military family. My husband is retired USAF, my son-in-law is active duty Navy and my step-grandson is about to graduate from high school and volunteer for the Navy. We know this date is about the men and women, boys and girls, sons and daughters, spouses and sweethearts, mothers and fathers and best friends who have been lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Mogadishu, Vietnam, Korea, N. Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and on, and on, and on.
ReplyDeleteSo many of those combatants found themselves reluctant, horrified, terrified participants in war. Many were drafted. Today, there is a default-draft: kids who either can't get into or can't afford to go to college, whose families are too dysfunctional to help them find safer paths, who can't find jobs, who find themselves with families of their own to support at very young ages,even those who can't afford law school or medical school any other way...these make up the bulk of the volunteer troops and much of the officer corps. What's voluntary about finding no other way to feed and house oneself or send money home than to turn oneself in at a recruiter's office? Our Volunteer Military is mostly made up of kids who volunteer to get a paycheck. And, these days, there are many, many more of those than there were ten years ago.
I couldn't agree with you more that ours is a warlike nation that poses as peacemaker. "Smug" is the right term. I've looked at the American military from both sides, as one who marched with Fonda and Vietnam Vets Against The War, and as the spouse of a military officer. I understand that the pride that most military members feel has more to do with avoiding cognitive dissonance than with a clear sense of America's psyche or our objective role in history. The young troops find themselves at war and fight for their lives and the lives of their friends.
Ours is a Memorial Day with no illusions. To hell with the rest.
Excellent post, Captain -- and the comments as well.
ReplyDeleteHere is a fragment of another great post on the subject, by John Cory:
I think Memorial Day is something we created to make ourselves feel better about those who die because we can't figure out how to stop war. It's like a National Day of Atonement without having to actually atone.
It's about survivor's guilt and finding distraction by giving honor to dishonorable purpose and valor to violence. War is our addiction. War is our recreation and procreation.
Memorial Day is that moment in the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller when Nately says, "Anything worth living for is worth dying for." And the old man replies, "And anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for." We can't quite make up our minds or get it right so we crawl inside a slogan or catchphrase to ease the pain.
It's like a patriotic Groundhog Day. We keep doing it over and over. Maybe we should incorporate the Punxsutawney Phil ritual? Think about it. What if we met at Arlington Cemetery every year and exhumed a soldier and held their remains up to the light? If we see their shadow, we know there will be six more decades of war.
Yes, I know. I'm being sacrilegious and disrespectful but aren't we all when we pretend there is something noble in this thing called war? Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
We don't want war but cry that it has been forced upon us and there is nothing we can do until we have finished off the enemy who just won't leave us alone. It is terrible but sometimes to make peace you have to make war. Peace is hard.
As Captain Black Adder said: "But the real reason for the whole thing was that is was just too much effort NOT to have a war."
So we need a day to remind us that war is the great employer. War is what gives us freedom as long as you don't complain about dying. War is a noble rite of passage. War gives us meaning and purpose. War is honor. God is war. Amen.
So it goes.
We pretend to be sane in an insane effort.
Lordy, that's good, Elizabeth! And the guy quotes Vonnegut and Heller; doesn't get much better on war that those two, in my book.
ReplyDeleteIf the war dead could speak, they would say, with Vonnegut, " I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." In honoring our war dead, we simply honor our vulnerable and confused humanity.
I think you're forgetting about that yellow cake uranium Iraq purchased from Nigeria. Bush's invasion protected our freedom to not be vaporized by the nuke Saddam was going to build and hand off to al Qaeda. Unless that was all proven to be BS -- I think you're wrong on that count. Great article otherwise -- I couldn't agree more.
ReplyDeleteVery intriguing....it echoes much of what I have thought.....Memorial Day is now all about BBQ's and sales. Independence Day is now just the '4th of July'.
ReplyDeleteThis and each Memorial Day I honor those souls who fought with me and never came home. But it's refreshing to see somebody speak the truth about the majority of slack-jawed sheep in the nation.
A powerful post and powerful comments as well. Our idealization of war allows us to avoid dealing with the realities of war. Instead of commemorating war as if it were some glorious event, we should abhor war and focus on eradicating it.
ReplyDeleteIt's fitting on Memorial Day weekend to mention Studs Terkel's oral history of WWII, The Good War. In it you'll find the whole spate of reactions to that experience -- a fair amount of WWII vets sound mighty pessimistic about the whole thing, and that surprised me. They sounded almost like Siegfried Sassoon in his bitter WWI poetry.
ReplyDeleteLiterary critic and WWII vet Paul Fussel's book The Great War also deserves a mention: it is a magnificent study of attitudes about WWI.
I too despise the chicken-hawks' celebratory chest-thumping on this holiday. I am not a veteran, but I have enough respect for vets not to treat such a sombre occasion that way. Have visited a few of the famous war memorials, and the one that impressed me most was the sight of so many old vets at the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in D.C. -- pensive, silently remembering the fellow soldiers they served with and lost. They know better than I, I'm sure, that while war may sometimes be necessary, it is the greatest mark of humanity's self-imposed failure -- a self-inflicted wound whose consequences are eternal and irretrievable.
"the nuke Saddam was going to build and hand off to al Qaeda. Unless that was all proven to be BS"
ReplyDeleteDude - you're joking, right? Please tell me you're joking!
"celebratory chest-thumping"
That's what passes for patriotism today - and perhaps all that passes. Remember the furor when Michelle hinted that she hadn't always been proud of the country and the pants pissing hysteria when her husband said the country sometimes might have seemed arrogant?
We're no different than football hooligans who paint themselves blue and puke in parking lots, break windows and beat up bystanders because of team pride.
"This and each Memorial Day I honor those souls who fought with me and never came home."
ReplyDeleteAmen
Yes, I think W-dervish was writing in ironic vein.... But what about the laser cannon Saddam was reportedly pointing at the moon? Now THAT has never been disproven.... I read it over at The Onion Press, where you can always get the truth!
ReplyDeleteI've long thought that someone with a longer attention span than I have could do a lot of exploration of the concept and place of proof in our smug culture.
ReplyDeleteOf course you can't (or so they think) prove evolution so it's only wild conjecture but you can't prove a god whose name is Joshua so that's all the evidence you need to believe in his assortment of powers and attributes.
Reason may be the greatest enemy of faith, as Brother Martin said, but it's also the enemy of delusion and we do hold onto our delusion with a passion. So much so that Saddam's giant nuclear facilities were spirited away to his arch enemy Iran in the dark of night and his chemical weapons stockpiles actually were found and we liberals simply are hiding it because liberals are the enemy of faith and love to tear down the entities we postulate to hold our delusions high.
I have to believe that delusion, neurotic obsession and even true insanity are the general condition of mankind, as well as our favorite and well defended state of mind.
I started re-reading Civilization and its discontents yesterday and found it much more accessible and rewarding than I did when someone told me to read it all those years ago.
No way, I was being totally serious. The claim that the proof Iraq had WMD might be a mushroom cloud -- so we had no choice but to illegally invade? It turned out to be complete BS! Why the hell wasn't this a-hole impeached? The whole lot of them belong behind bars.
ReplyDeleteI just received "The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder" by Vincent Bugliosi -- the audio book version on 9 CDs. An eBay purchase I paid just 99 cents plus shipping for. I showed it to a friend and she asked me if it was a work of fiction. :(
"if it was a work of fiction."
ReplyDeleteI woke up nearly every day for 8 years asking myself if this was a bad dream. It was, of course, but it was real anyway.