Pretense of Remembrance on Memorial Day
I don't do Memorial Day. I suppose Memorial Day does me, days and weeks before the annual barrage of remembrance platitudes. Recollections of ageless high school friends flood my senses during its flag-waving buildup, specters alive as if they actually came home from Vietnam in one piece. My childhood rival and best friend was missing in action for nearly 20 years before what was left of him was found. I’ve thought of him for almost 50 years, living and dreaming enough for both of us, but this week is hard.
Daytime reveries and distractions are also heightened, triggered easily by misplaced guilt and moral injury or even an early Rolling Stones track, but always entangled with a surge of aggressive commercialism, building to a crescendo with the last 24 notes of Taps on the last Monday in May. More affront than tribute, our country’s hypocritical remembrance is now on global display, and unavoidably an open wound to survivors and victims everywhere.
Ironically, President Harry S. Truman, at the request of Congress, proclaimed Memorial Day, May 30, 1950, and each succeeding Memorial Day, a National Day of Prayer and Permanent Peace. In what might now seem more appropriate as a lede for an Onion piece, every POTUS since then has followed suit. In an era of endless war, usable nukes and bloated Pentagon budgets, an official US holiday devoted to permanent peace could not ring more hollow. Historian, author and veteran activist Howard Zinn elaborated:
Memorial Day will be celebrated ... by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.
Most of the fallen (read: ”senselessly slaughtered”) in my lifetime didn’t live long enough to learn why they fought, much less who or where. My warrior friend risked his life for his immediate family and his own father's wartime legacy, a common theme during the LBJ/Nixon betrayal. Most – by no means, all - just trusted their government and an unbroken line of unbloodied patriot, sell-outs on Capitol Hill who continue to betray multi-generational legacies today, even today, at the brink of World War III in Eastern Europe.
On the heels of incinerating Japan and launching the Atomic Age, Truman certainly could have done worse than a proclamation for a National Day of Prayer and "permanent peace," but someone's God hasn't been paying attention, or has absolutely no pull. Recent studies credit our prayerful nation with culpability - militarily or economically - for between 20 and 30 million deaths by wars and conflicts since 1945. While civilian casualties are incalculable, so far over 7,000 US service members have been killed “protecting our freedoms” in Global War on Terror war zones. Has there ever been more of a misnomer of late than “Post-War”?
As if by postscript, following this week’s elementary school mass shooting and the non-stop carnage in Ukraine, Joe Biden issued his annual Memorial Day proclamation for a day of prayer for “permanent peace.” Amidst the decades of grieving and empty promises for Congressional commonsense gun safety legislation, you might have missed it. While prayer and divine intervention might be overrated, even ludicrous to many of the countless wounded, some Americans may actually still give peace a chance. They might still be hopeful, a Shawshank Redemption lifer-Andy Dufresne kind of hopeful, and that’s not so bad. After all, as Andy said, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
Let’s hope.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2021 and has been updated for currency and accuracy, with no end to US foreign and domestic savagery in sight.