How Memorial Day Glosses Over the Real Horrors of War

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/story/155618/how_memorial_day_glosses_over_the_real_horrors_of_war/


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It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves. Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.

Into the Memory Hole

May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan. It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate anydeclines in deaths on our roads and highways.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. My concept of Memorial Day changed after I watched

"All's Quiet On The Western Front". War isn't sterile. It isn't symbolic. It's real. It's fear, courage, danger, hunger, fatigue, loyalty, forced animus, and insanity. That's what people don't understand they're "honoring" on Memorial Day. To make victims of war, the pawns of rich men in power, into iconic symbols, heroes, does a disservice to their deaths.

[HereSince1628]

2. Memorial Day is a giant screen upon which everyone projects what's in their own mind.

I am not sure it can be any other way. And I am not sure that remembering the horror of war is the only projection that gets placed on it. It's also the playground for military movie marathons, which all reflect the politics of the time they were made, as well as the interpretation from our own lives that we project upon them today.

For those who wish to do so, Decoration Day/Memorial Day can be experienced as an opportunity to reeducate and propagandize. A day to create images of a military and of a time that we currently need to get us through the present. In an historical period of jingoism, as we live in now, all things ever touched by the military are venerated and heroicized beyond anything that veterans would recognize as 'authentic'.

Fly-bys over sporting events have nothing to do with exposing the horrors of war. And if they did, in 2012 shouldn't we be doing fly-overs of Predator drones?

When the federal holiday first came into existence after the Civil War, the people in southern states refused to recognize it and set up their own dates to decorate the graves of those who fell. The south generally refused to recognize Decoration Day until after WWI when the purpose of the holiday shifted from ostensible remembrance of those who sacrificed in the civil war to Americans who fought in all wars. Southern states still retain separate dates, often different dates, to remember the Confederate dead across the old south.

It's a holiday whose birth was observed through lenses tinted with old politics and regional identity, that gave it different views to different people, why shouldn't it still be?

How to say that it's a holiday of pure spirit? It's a holiday whose significance was touched by a law that turned it into a 3-day weekend in the 1970's and thereby for scores of millions of Americans made it's economic significance over-shadow the holiday's moral and spiritual significance.

Is that bad? Is it good? Do other's respect and keep it as it 'should' be? Who is to say, really?

Well, in all honestly--EACH OF US--is supposed to figure out what it means. That's the nature of special remembrance.