27 May 2024 – – Memorial Day is meant to be a day dedicated for honoring U.S. military personnel who have died while serving in the United States armed forces, a somber occasion to pause and reflect as a nation.
Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.
But for most Americans today is merely the unofficial start to summer. Families BBQ on the grill, the local pool announces its opening day, and retailers promote big sales.
Over 1.3 million Americans have paid the ultimate sacrifice for their nation. But that will be pretty much lost, forgotten today.
Memorial Day was originally called “Decoration Day”. The head of an organization of Union veterans established the day as a way for the nation to honor the graves of those who died in the Civil War, with flowers to be placed on military graves across the U.S. (the addition of flags came much later). May 30th was chosen as the day to observe because flowers would be in bloom nationwide.
There are debates over which city was the “origin place” of Memorial Day, although the first large observation was held at Arlington National Cemetery for a crowd of about 5,000 in 1868. In 1971, Congress declared “Memorial Day” a national holiday, placing it as the last Monday in May. The day was expanded to honor all those who have died in American wars.
In December 2000, Congress passed and the president signed into law “The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” to ensure those who sacrificed their lives for the country were not forgotten.
At 3 p.m. today (local time, wherever you are) Americans are asked to take part in the “National Moment of Remembrance”, a time to pause in a moment of silence to honor those who have died serving the U.S.
I will observe the day in my own way. But a sense of shame and dread envelopes me, as it has over the last few years as fascism seems to have seized the country of my birth. Because although no longer a U.S. citizen, I find myself irrevocably tangled in America’s hopes, arrogance, and despair.
On this Memorial Day, the time of year that the U.S. should remember those who died while serving in the military, I cannot help but think that in today’s political climate, such honor has changed. Every year at this time I’m thinking of friends I’ve lost in and out of the military, and wondering how I feel about “dying in service of your country” these days. I see the disintegrating bonds among Americans and the weakening support of democratic norms that seems to percolate under its civil discourse.
There are few, if any, Americans now alive who lived during America’s most violent, brutal and deadly era. None remember the greatest cataclysm in American history that continues to define that nation in its present, and shape its future. Some say there is no racism in America, and that learning about the evils of slavery, oppression and racism threatens the future. They do a great disservice to the memories of the dead who fought an existential struggle to preserve the United States, abolish slavery and rebuild the meaning of freedom. There was no doubt about the cause for which they fought.
The writer Paul Shoffner (who often calls himself a “curator of quotes”) went through his quote library, and last night he posted the following ones on his blog.
The first three are from Mehmet Murat Ildan (translated from the Turkish):
“Let fascism find not even a single passage to power or else that poisonous snake will infiltrate into the every vital corner of the country and kill the future of the nation!”
“Earth is a heaven but man often creates many hells within this heaven and a fascist country is one of the hottest and the most suffocating hell amongst all those hells!”
“By being a fascist you lose your right to be called human being!”
“Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them” – Voltaire
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins” – William Pitt
“The struggle is so great that the triumph over fascism alone is worth the sacrifice of our lives” – Frederica Montseny
“Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom” – Chris Hedges
“I don’t fight fascists because I’ll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists” – Chris Hedges
I understand all of these quotes, and I get where Paul is coming from. I recently re-read Benjamin Carter Hett’s “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise To Power” and one paragraph jumped out at me:
Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable.
Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.
Or The Guardian article from 2021 which I often quote, entitled “America is now in fascism’s legal phase“, which has even more import today. One paragraph:
The history of racism in the U.S. is fertile ground for fascism. Attacks on the courts, education, the right to vote and women’s rights are further steps on the path to toppling democracy. There comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.
Just read some of the MAGA and far right blogs (I have a steady diet) and the sad, weird thing is that Trump supporters think Biden is the perpetrator of oppression. They refuse to see the threats of Trump as real because he assuages their fears with words of supposed authority. In practice, those words become repression of civil rights and outright prejudice.
But because those baser instincts resonate with his sycophants, who are principally transactional in their incivility, the “I’ve Got Mine and You Can’t Take It” MAGA mindset reigns supreme amongst the populace conflicted by how the true moral of their religion do not support the man, and whose claims of patriotism are falsified by their despise of the freedoms the nation is supposed to support.
The right-wing media propaganda machine pushes so many false narratives about things like the non-existent “war on Christmas”. They come up with endless nonsense like that – incessantly.
But that’s the thing.We have made it so easy for them. Yes, every American has a right to be angry and ticked off. It is natural. It is our life and times.
But what they do is say “boy, do we have a story that will make your blood boil!! ” We have allowed our modern society to be a social media driven society, our interactions incentivized and monetized for outrage. And it is exhausting for everyone.
And frankly, it is coming from all sides: the left, the right, the swifties and now even the young adult literature readers.
We are surrounded by and inundated with more speech than has ever existed in the history of communication. And it is all weaponized by professional outrage. Hunters of all stripes scouring the globe for graduation speech, snippets offhand comments during promotional tours, out of context, comedy bits, lame marketing ideas or any words and phrases they believe they can latch onto to generate monetized clicks.
Outrage is the engine of our modern media economy. And the Democrats are outgunned.
Erich Fromm, the German-American social psychologist and humanistic philosopher, wrote a lot about all of this. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. Over the weekend I was re-reading a few chapters of his “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” and one paragraph made me think of the Democrats:
When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.
Fascism gained power over men because of their blindness. A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed. The optimism of people standing on the edge of the grave is astounding.
Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. But if it is true that man does not renounce freedom voluntarily, it is going to be a hell of a battle.
I am told that Trump’s influence is waning, that he is done. That America will not endorse a blatant liar, a rapist, a fraudster, Putin’s best buddy and a Ranting Unhinged Orange Jesus. Well, they elected him once, and his political machine saw the mistakes he made 4 years ago and are running things differently to win – including voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc.
And I remain buggered by the frightening poll reality, which shows a neck-in-neck race between Trump and Biden. It does not suggest the MAGA movement is receding in any meaningful way, though they remain a minority of Americans, as they always have been. But it’s yet another reminder that Trump’s narcissism blinds him to the true nature of his support. Trump runs around describing himself as a perfect person in body and mind, possessing an athletic physique, a genius-level intellect, and an inability to err in any way. He mistakenly feels that’s what his voters see, as well, and so is perplexed when they don’t flock to defend their orange-hued god from his supposed persecutors.
But this ain’t rocket science. The MAGA movement has always viewed Trump more as a weapon against their perceived enemies than as a messiah figure. No doubt Trump’s obnoxious personality and seeming impunity from consequences undergird his appeal to MAGA audiences, but mostly because they want to instrumentalize these qualities for their political ends. They enjoy his criminality when it seems useful to them, such as when Trump was trying to steal an election or illegally deport people they don’t like. His rallies draw crowds less because people care what he says – they don’t seem to really listen, anyway, which is why they don’t notice him babbling incoherently or praising fictional cannibal killers – but more for the typical fascist reason of wanting to display a show of force.
This trial, however, is something most MAGA people want to think about as little as possible. It’s a bummer being reminded their leader is a pitiful man who has to bully women into bed to get laid. It’s not inspiring to hear him whine non-stop every time he has a chance. They like Trump when he’s making them feel like winners, with his baseless boasting and empty promises. Even with his faithless entourage around him, though, he just feels like a tired old man who won’t even admit he had sex with Stormy Daniels, which would at least impress some of his more incel-oriented followers. Anecdotally, I’ve seen a shift in the social media postings from the MAGA hotheads, who seldom mention Trump now, choosing instead to mostly bash on Joe Biden.
Eh, as H.L. Mencken said in 1926: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”.
Michael Avery Pursel died serving during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was 19. He died due to an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations. Every year his sister visits his grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
But our feelings about these federal memorial holidays evolve through the years. I have spoken to many veterans who came home from Vietnam, thoroughly disillusioned with “American values,” who dismiss our current “celebrations” of F-15 flyovers, “God Bless America” singalongs, and stadium events singling out veterans for applause. As the decades have ground on, fewer and fewer people standing in solemn participation with these ritual events have had any military service of their own to fully understand them. There is the pity.
As noted by Andrew Bacevitch after he endured military “remembrances” at one more baseball game played on Memorial Day:
What a masterpiece of “contrived spontaneity”. Leaving spectators feeling good about their baseball team, about their military, and not least of all about themselves – precisely as it was meant to do. Cheap Pentagon p.r. exercises, along with the flag-waving mattress sales and “start of summer” alcohol-soaked barbecues. I respectfully decline to stand up, with thousands of other baseball fans, hand over heart, for the socially coercive playing of the religio-nationalist God Bless America, during the 7th inning break.
And a note on Andrew Bacevitch. He is a retired Army colonel and esteemed military and diplomatic historian. His books are brilliant. He served in Vietnam in the 1970s. He was a persistent and vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, saying the conflict would be a catastrophic failure because the Bush administration had no understanding of the Middle East. His son, also an Army officer, died fighting in the Iraq War in May 2007.
My own feelings about Memorial Day have steadily changed since the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and so many soul draining counterterrorism missions gave lie to America’s proclaimed “values”. As with Vietnam, the veterans of these conflicts participated in expeditions that most quickly saw were doomed, or worse – meaningless.
But they soldiered on, mostly out of their own self-respect and the respect of their battle buddies. But the butcher’s bill inevitably came due: a 2022 study showed that four times as many active duty service members and veterans died by suicide as died in battle since 9/11. This was a scourge that exploded in the wake of Vietnam and has never been solved, although the Veterans Administration keeps saying “we’re trying”.
And, yes. Cynic and skeptic that I am I do still worry about the disintegrating bonds among Americans and the weakening support of democratic norms that seems to percolate under their civil discourse. At various times, I’ve been depressed, angry or scared of what is happening over there.
The one thing I haven’t been is hopeful. There are few (if any) American politicians who have been particularly reassuring. Certainly not the current Commander-in-Chief, nor his predecessor.
Yet many of us still value at least some of the sacrifices made in past, made for our future. My wish on this day is to continue to venerate – and tie myself to – that past, to identify myself as “American”, even if that name is now so tarnished given today’s geopolitical inferno.
Can America really hold onto a “government of laws, a government of hope”, and perhaps re-shape its tarnished identity? I have no illusions on that point.
But today, at 3pm, my time, I am going to stop and take that “National Moment of Remembrance”, to pause in a moment of silence to honor those who have died serving the U.S. – men and women who really believed and gave a damn about their comrades and maybe about their country. And paid the supreme price for doing so.