Remembering this day those who lost their lives fighting in wars under the American flag. I make no attempt this day to adjudicate the justness of any of those wars; there are other days for that.
Every year on this date I listen to this song. It’s been done by many artists, so here it is by the Dropkick Murphys. This song is one of the best artistic meditations on the awful futility of war that I know, because those last words are so absolutely true: “It all happened again, and again, and again….” I don’t find a great deal of solace or even solemnity in Memorial Day, just a sadness that we keep coming back to this and that there will never, ever, be a Memorial Day when we can say, “Interesting, there are no new names to remember this time around.”
I’m also reminded of Lee Blessing’s play A Walk in the Woods, which dramatizes an event in the 1980s when two arms negotiators, one American and one Soviet, got frustrated with the lack of progress and wandered off to put together their own proposal, which was soundly rejected by both sides for being too realistic, I suppose. In that play, Blessing puts these words in the mouth of his Soviet negotiator:
“If mankind hated war, there would be millions of us, and only two soldiers.”
I fnd it hard to disagree with that sentiment.
Here are the Dropkick Murphys.
oh how do you do, young willy mcbride do you mind if i sit here down by your graveside and rest for a while in the warm summer sun i’ve been walking all day, and im nearly done and i see by your gravestone you were only nineteen when you joined the great fallen in 1916 well i hope you died quick and i hope you died clean oh willy mcbride, was is it slow and obscene
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
and did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind in some loyal heart is your memory enshrined and though you died back in 1916 to that loyal heart you’re forever nineteen or are you a stranger without even a name forever enshrined behind some old glass pane in an old photograph torn, tattered, and stained and faded to yellow in a brown leather frame
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
the sun shining down on these green fields of france the warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance the trenches have vanished long under the plow no gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing down but here in this graveyard that’s still no mans land the countless white crosses in mute witness stand till’ man’s blind indifference to his fellow man and a whole generation were butchered and damned
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
and i can’t help but wonder oh willy mcbride do all those who lie here know why they died did you really believe them when they told you the cause did you really believe that this war would end wars well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame the killing and dying it was all done in vain oh willy mcbride it all happened again and again, and again, and again, and again
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
Let’s see what the bookbanners are up to, shall we? I know, it’s depressing work, but these people are relentless and they are finding more and more creative ways to tighten the noose around books, free expression, and those of us who value those things.
:: I saw this GoFundMe campaign to support a library whose board fired four employees who defied orders to remove books from the library. And that’s bad enough, but what caught my eye here was this sign:
The sign, in front of what is clearly the children’s section of the library, reads:
As a safety precaution, children under the age of 12 may not be unattended. The library cannot be held responsible for your child. Thank you for your cooperation.
And look, maybe that’s simply about the safety of children being left unsupervised; it may even be an advisable and wise policy. But I have to admit to being saddened by the loss to young people of a safe space that I enjoyed in my childhood. I spent many of my childhood hours hanging around in libraries, reading and looking through books, while my parents were off running this or that errand. We continue to send the ever more insidious message to our kids that the world is an inherently dangerous place and that they are not to be allowed to explore it at all until such time as they are, what? Of legal age to drive, or serve in the military? Both of which you can do years before you can vote, or drink alcohol.
Also, I can’t help thinking that this sign isn’t just about that. I can’t help thinking it’s a prophylactic measure. This way, it’s not the evil librarians’ fault if Little Johnny is (gasp!) exploring the shelves on his own and happens upon a copy of something dangerous! something that will warp and pervert him! I can’t help wondering if this “No unattended kids under 12” policy isn’t so much aimed at protecting kids but protecting the librarians from some busybody Mom-For-Liberty type who spends her toilet time watching LibsOfTIktok videos who is livid that her precious Little Johnny somehow managed to get his hands on a copy of Gender Queer and maybe actually read a few pages of it. To the fainting couch, Helen!
:: The library in the item above is in Alabama. Not to be outdone is Louisiana, whose state legislature is considering making it a literally jailable offense for any state employee to do business with the American Library Association. I won’t quote all the nauseating details here, but I will note the ongoing creativity our country’s right-wing has in finding ways to tighten the screws on whatever the hell it is they don’t want other people doing. They’re not going to violate any specific rights, you see; they’re simply making it harder and harder and harder to actually exercise those rights, or they’re making it easier and easier and easier for people who don’t want you exercising your rights to stop you from doing so. It’s Stealth Fascism, but it’s still Fascism.
Be aware, folks–especially if you’re at all inclined to dip your toes into the “Third Party” waters this November for whatever reason.
This is a re-post that generally reflects my frustration with the American approach to teaching and thinking about its own history. It’s not specifically about Martin Luther King Jr., but I think it applies, particularly when MLK Jr. is treated by many on the right as a source of exactly one quote. For content specifically about Rev. King, see Roger’s post.
No subject is more eternally disappointing to see discussed in America than race, because a great many of us simply don’t have any inclination to engage in anything remotely resembling an honest discussion of race at all.
This is not the least bit new. All that’s changed, in recent months, is the wording. White people have been finding ways to dodge discussions of racism probably since the beginning of time, but the most prominent version in my personal experience has been simple dismissal of the subject as soon as it is brought up: some version of “There they go again, playing the Race Card,” usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.
What is signaled by saying “Playing the Race Card” is itself a rhetorical strategy that has several goals: it’s a granting of permission to oneself to ignore anything the other person is saying, as well as a signal to that person that their words are falling on ears that have been rendered deaf before the fact. It’s a neutering of conversation, and saying it is a metaphorical hanging of the “CLOSED” sign on the mind.
The racism-denialist side has become a bit more sophisticated of late, which you can see in the way they have cynically elevated something called “Critical Race Theory” to the status of Bogeyman Supreme in this country. For a good summation of this, I strongly recommend the summation John Oliver did on this season’s opening episode of Last Week Tonight:
Of special interest is the fact that not one of the people shrieking most loudly about “Critical Race Theory” can tell you the first factual thing about “Critical Race Theory”, and that the American right-wing has become so divorced from any factual basis for its constant drum-beating about nonexistent grievances that now their entire debate can be shaped by dishonest actors like Christopher Rufo, who will publicly and openly admit the dishonest nature of their rhetorical framing as they watch their preferred framing of the debate happen anyway. These people are deeply sophisticated in their knowledge of how American media will follow a bouncing ball to the end of the Earth, so long as the ball is set bouncing by the right wing.
I personally do not know much at all about Critical Race Theory, but I am at least aware that my willingness to admit this puts me in an unfortunate minority among white people. Weird irony, that.
What catches me so much about the rhetoric around the thing that right-wingers have crafted in their increasingly fever-minded, fact-deprived heads about “Critical Race Theory” is one objection I hear over and over and over again. You’ll hear it in the Oliver segment above, and I also saw it this past week in comments on a post to my local Nextdoor forum.
(Yes, I’m on Nextdoor, mainly because it’s useful for stuff like “Hey, anybody know what all those sirens were last night” and “Anybody know a good roofer?” But the site is very obnoxious in a lot of other ways, and I’ve imposed a personal rule of never posting at all on it. One good example is the thread from a few weeks ago–and I am not making this up–of a person breathlessly posting about the suspicious-looking ‘colored’ person in the pickup truck who was obviously casing local houses…until someone else on that same street said, “Yeah, that’s Bob. He’s a meter-reader for the power company.” If I had commented on that, I probably would have been banned.)
(UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I closed out my NextDoor account. It just got to be too much idiotic racism.)
A person posted about “Critical Race Theory” being taught! in the local elementary schools!!! Now, this is BS, obviously, and to their credit, a few folks did point out that this is total BS. But equally obviously, “Critical Race Theory” is just a catch-phrase for these people that has come to refer to any mention of race at all, in any context. (Which is what Rufo et al. intended the entire time–again, see Mr. Oliver.) And that framing leads to this specific talking point:
“I do not want my children being taught to feel bad about their country!”
Or:
“I do not want my child being made to feel BAD about their history!”
Or:
“I don’t want my kid being made to feel like they have to answer for things they didn’t do!”
And you know what? Maybe that’s a bit tempting. I never owned any slaves! Why do I have to feel bad about it? Why do I have to atone for that? It was 150 years ago! Leave me alone! Lemme be! Get over it!
When you really start digging into this, you realize quickly that these people don’t want history taught as a factual discipline from which we can learn valuable lessons for the future and in which we come to see the flaws as well as the strengths in the generations that preceded us. No, these people want a feel-good story, a hegemonic tale whose purpose is to shape young minds so they get obediently tearful in the presence of a flag (and, maybe just maybe, the creepy politician literally hugging it). They want the Hero’s Epic version of history, with an honesty-obsessed George Washington admitting chopping down the tree years before he stood proud and tall in that boat as he crossed the Delaware. They want a tale of lantern-jawed heroes, always driven forward by God and goodness, with their women at their backs (always, always that) as they hew their destinies from the land itself.
These people want all the feel-good stuff from history, and that’s it. They want heroic inspiration from the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson’s diplomacy and writings, and none of the frankly horrific caution of Thomas Jefferson’s forced relations with his own slaves. It’s this feel-good cherrypicking approach to history that gives me particular pause, because it’s borne of the same lack of curiosity and honesty that leads these same people to embrace nonsense across the board, including rejecting vaccines in favor of some random medication pushed by some random doctor Joe Rogan had on the podcast this week.
“I don’t want my kid to feel bad about their history!”
Look, here’s the thing, for all those people who complain that they don’t want their children being made to feel bad about their history, or to feel like they are being blamed for awful things their ancestors did:
If you’re not going to let the evils in our past make you feel bad, then you don’t get to turn about and let the triumphs in that same past make you feel good.
If you don’t want to feel bad about slavery, or Jim Crow, or red-lining, or the KKK, or resistance to Civil Rights, then you also don’t get to feel good about defeating fascism in World War II, or triumphing over the East in the Cold War, or landing on the Moon. History is not a buffet where you can choose what things you like and which you don’t.
And this isn’t about “feeling bad” in the proper context to “feel good” about the good stuff, either. History isn’t about feeling bad or feeling good. History is about learning what we’ve done, the good and the bad, so we can make better decisions later.
But we don’t want that…or too few of us want that. We don’t want to talk or even hear about race. If we do, we want to pretend that ending officially-sanctioned slavery and quoting a single sentence from a single speech by Martin Luther King is all the discussion race ever needed. I don’t know how we get White America to even come to the table to have the discussion much less honestly engage it in the first place, but I do know that if something in history makes you feel bad, you shouldn’t avoid that topic but interrogate it even harder, because if something your ancestors did a few dozen or a few hundred years ago makes you feel bad, maybe it’s relevant to something going on now.
First thought: I’m getting really tired of the prevailing response to news of just about any garden-variety street crime being a roll of the eyes, followed by, “See? Bail reform!”
Second thought: Americans are very, very, very bad at seeing how societal problems tie into one another. Every issue is treated as a distinct problem to solve, which ultimately ends up meaning that none of them really get solved.
Third thought: You’d think more people would realize that maybe a country that incarcerates more people per capita (and in sheer numbers) than any other country on earth should start looking for different solutions to crime.
I’m generally of the view that ownership, or management, or capital, or whatever should almost never be listened to or taken seriously during times of labor strife, and that in such times you should listen to the striking workers. Not working is always the last choice, for obvious reasons, and when it gets to that point, things are generally well and truly bad.
Writer Mark Evanier has been one of my go-to sources for the ongoing Writers Strike in America’s teevee and film industry. This post is a good example of why:
This includes putting up with the most maddening part of it: Hearing some guy who gets paid a zillion dollars a week tell us that the business is hurting and there’s simply no money to give to us. When I hear this — and we always hear this — I always think, “Your only responsibility is to make as much money as possible for your company. If it’s doing that badly, shouldn’t you be fired?”
While we’re toughing it out, it would help to think about preparing for the next one. If we take a terrible deal this time, the next one will come sooner and be a whole lot worse.
If the last few years haven’t driven home the degree to which labor is getting short-changed their share of the spoils from record profits, I don’t know what kind of economy will.
“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”
“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.
“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.
And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”
And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.
But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.
An annual reposting of some things pertaining to Memorial Day. First, a remembrance of a soldier I never knew.
Fifteen years ago I wrote the following on Memorial Day, and I wanted to revisit it. It’s about the Vietnam Veteran whose name I remember, despite the fact that I had no relation to him and clearly never knew him, because he was killed four years before I was born.
Memorial Day, for all its solemnity, has for me always been something of a distant holiday, because no one close to me has ever fallen in war, and in fact I have to look pretty far for relatives who have even served in wartime. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War I, but both had been dead for years when I was born. I know that an uncle of mine served during World War II, but I also know that he saw no action (not to belittle his service, but Memorial Day is generally set aside to remember those who paid the “last full price of devotion”). My father-in-law served in Viet Nam, but my own father did not (he had college deferments for the first half of the war, and was above draft age during the second). So there is little in my family history to personalize Memorial Day; for me, it really is a day to remember “all the men and women who have died in service to the United States”.
One personal remembrance, though, does creep up for me each Memorial Day. It has nothing at all to do with my family; in fact, I have no connection with the young man in question.
When I was in grade school, during the fall and spring, when the weather was nice, we would have gym class outdoors, at the athletic field. On good days we’d play softball or flag football or soccer; on not-so-good days we’d run around the quarter-mile track. But the walk to the athletic field involved crossing the street in front of the school and walking a tenth of a mile or so down the street, past the town cemetery. I remember that at the corner of the cemetery we passed, behind the wrought-iron fence, the grave of a man named Larry Havers was visible. His stone was decorated with a photograph of him, in military uniform. I don’t recall what branch in which he served, nor do I recall his date-of-birth as given on the stone, but I do recall the year of his death: 1967. I even think the stone specified the specific battle in which he was killed in action, but I’m not sure about that, either.
That’s what I remember each Memorial Day: the grave of a man I never knew, who died four years before I was born in a place across the world to which I doubt I’ll ever go. And in the absence of anyone from my own family, Mr. Havers’s name will probably be the one I look for if I ever visit that memorial in Washington. I hope his family wouldn’t mind.
I looked online and found these images, first of Mr. Havers’s obituary and then of Mr. Havers himself. The things you remember. I wonder what kind of man he was. He has been gone for more than half a century. His name is not forgotten.
Mr. Havers’s service information can be found on the Virtual Vietnam Wall here. He was born 14 October 1946 and died 29 October 1967, in Thua Thien.
—
A song: “The Green Fields of France”, by Eric Bogle
Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
And I can’t help but wonder why, young Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
