My Post Memorial Day Post From Last Year

"You got nothing out of the war except the "flu" and prohibition."_{Victor Berger} 

I was at my mother's house Sunday night, her current favorite program about British midwives in the 1950s wasn't on.  Instead there was Gary Sinise's vulgar, Hollywood style spectacle of military worship and war promotion.   It was billed as a Memorial Day concert but there are different ways to memorialize war dead,  an enormous percentage of whom are civilians.  Whom it is obviously unpatriotic to notice as they constitute a collective mountain of bodies.  I'm old enough to remember when Memorial Day was a more general remembrance of all of the dead.  But, then, it was the 1950s and the idea that peace was unpatriotic hadn't completely filtered into the rural town I lived in. 

Gary Sinise is someone whose existence would be unknown to me except he decided to build his career on the worship of the military and war and Republican politics.  It's not an unknown career strategy in Hollywood.  John Wayne is, of course, famous as the embodiment of the American warrior who never got around to enlisting.  It seems he really, really wanted to join up to fight WWII but he always had just one more picture to finish and so the studios used their connections to dodge him being drafted.  That is the form of passive draft dodging that has always been available to the rich, the connected and those who are profitable for such.  I remember the reaction of my aunt when she heard someone making the excuse that Wayne had four children to support and was in his early 30s during the war.  "That didn't keep them from drafting my husband and we had to live on his pay."   Believe me, they weren't in the Wayne family income bracket.  Sinise is also the voice of the virtual tour of the Reagan Library, another Hollywood style super-patriot who, while officially enlisted, doesn't seem to have ever been in any danger of seeing combat, except maybe with the script girl.  His eyesight was given as the reason he spent the war in show biz, something that I heard several veterans scoff at. I wish I could have asked the veterans of that war I knew more of what they thought of that, though a lot of them had no use for Reagan. 

You can learn something from looking at the war record of that and other generations of razzle-dazzle super-patriots and comparing how the media talk about them and how it talks about people such as George McGovern and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom had real instead of celluloid wars.   The men who I knew who were in hard combat, especially those who were conscripts or who didn't choose it as a career have generally been anything from skeptical about war to entirely cynical about the military and the governments who send people to fight wars. 

I've seen my country gradually adopting an official style of memorializing those who fought in wars called by our politicians that is more suited to a dictatorship.   A mix of dishonest sentimentality, hypocritical piety, falsified history and the most vulgar, cloying and putrid of Hollywood-Las Vegas styled patrieroticism for clearly bad motives.  It is a propaganda  forthe military industrial complex, it is PR for the ruling oligarchy whose need for cannon fodder is one of its few remaining uses it has for the people of the United States.  It's gotten far worse in the past thirty five years, especially since Ronald Reagan was promoted to the presidency by the media which then genuflected to him and the unofficial though very real illegal wars he engaged in in Central America and elsewhere.   It was another actual veteran of the Second World War who I heard lament that with Reagan's actions in Central America, the United States had devolved into a terror state. 

Memorial Day has been stolen by the war promoters, it's time we took it back.  Noticing the civilian dead in wars is a necessary step in doing that.  Cancel the next concert, it's an atrocity.

Victor Berger couldn't have known it when he said that in the early 1920s but The People got something else out of WWI.  We got the conditions that led to the Great Depression and then, beyond any doubt,  an even bigger war in WWII.   With war, you reap what you sow.   Corpses.