The Sweet and Proper Thing

Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori

"Does it matter, losing your sight? There's such splendid work for the blind, And people will always be kind...."

Siegfried Sassoon

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
5/26/05
http://zeppscommentaries.com/History/memorial2005.htm

Memorial Day has always been something of a puzzle to me. It’s a holiday that commemorates the end of no particular war. It started out as something called “Decoration Day,” when people would go out and lay flowers and ribbons on the tombs of soldiers killed in the Civil War. But the North and the South couldn’t agree on who started the practice (over two dozen towns lay claim to it), an argument the North eventually won, and the South subsequently refused to acknowledge the day until after World War I, when the holiday was broadened to include soldiers killed in all American wars. Presumably by then the ranks of the widows of civil war casualties had gotten pretty thin, and florists and ribbon makers were noticing that business was dropping off.

When I was a kid, we had Remembrance Day. That was on November 11th, and at 11:11 am, we would gather around the flagpole, wearing paper poppies, for a moment’s silence. It always seemed more solid, somehow. You could picture the Johnnies and Kaiser Bill’s boys squatting in their sordid trenches, listening as the guns magically fell silent. At 11:11 on 11/11 we shared a magic moment that crossed six time zones and 40 some years. Vets from the BEF, ancient and yet resplendent for one day, would march proudly, and people would sing the old war songs.

Americans celebrate by going to the lake or the forest or their brother-in-law’s, or by watching cheesy old movies on the SciFi channel, or just by working without overtime or holiday pay, just one more pain-in-the-ass three-day weekend that they don’t benefit from. 

Most holidays here suffer from that lack of connectedness. Back in 1971, the government recognized that the old way of celebrating holidays, when people actually celebrated or commemorated specific events that occurred on specific dates, was bad for business, so they decided to put all the holidays on the Monday nearest the actual date. Worse, they took Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday, combined them, and told the people to celebrate a generic president’s birthday, usually on a day when no president was ever actually born. It’s no wonder nobody gives a shit about “Presidents Day” except retailers, and employees lucky enough to either get the day off or get holiday pay. 

Memorial Day, despite the lofty and stirring intent behind it, suffers from the same problem. It’s a generic holiday. It commemorates no specific war, no specific event. And for many, if not most Americans, it’s just a pain in the ass where they have to work harder and gain no benefit from it. 

This year in particular sees Memorial Day with a cloud over it, a cloud that America has never seen before. True, America has fought unjust wars before. And true, America has had presidents who lied them into war for venal and base reasons. America has even seen Presidents use war as an excuse to suborn freedoms and rights, and thrown innocent people into camps for stupid and ignorant reasons. 

But America has never had Gulags before; not like these. Never had a vast series of prison camps in which people are thrown without benefit of trial or even accusation, to be tortured, raped and murdered – by American soldiers. Never in the 230 years of American history have Americans seen their military so deeply shamed and disgraced as it has been by the horrific stories and pictures to emerge from Abu Ghraib, from Guantanamo, from Basram, and dozens of other camps throughout the middle east and in the former Soviet republics. 

To the rest of the world I say, most Americans understand that this is wrong, very wrong, and they are angry that it is being done in their name. It is a shadow that most Americans feel this Memorial Day, a sense that their country has lost its way in a terrible and foul manner. Most Americans are not murderous pigs who will imprison a man without charges or conviction and torture him for information he doesn’t have.

Americans have heard war propaganda from their government before. Usually it was as benign as such can be, of the “why we fight” variety. However, a weaker and more uncertain breed of Americans came along in the past half century, and accuses those who questioned the need for a war of being anti-American and unpatriotic. And the government never flat-out lied to the people in order to create artificial war heroes, as they do not with Jessica Lynch (who didn’t shoot anybody, wasn’t shot or molested herself, and eventually stood up and said her government was lying about her supposedly heroic deeds) or with Tillman, the football player who supposedly died heroically, saving his squad from enemy fire, but who in fact was gunned down by friendly fire, with no enemy in sight. 

Americans have been lied into war before, but never quite as blatantly as now. Most Americans realize – now – that the administration lied about WMDs and a host of other things in order to start a war against Iraq. With the Downing Street Memo, there is no longer any possible room to believe that Putsch was misled by faulty intelligence, or misunderstood the situation in some other way. The memo makes it unequivocally clear that Putsch knew the exact situation, and knew that he would have to lie about it in order to persuade Congress and the American people to let him invade and occupy Iraq. America has gotten into brush wars before for venal and base reasons that had nothing to do with national security, but never on this scale, or this savagely. 

We torture and degrade men against our own most deeply-held principles, and we do it for the sake of a lie.

It used to be that on Memorial Day, truculent right wingers would complain about the stories of Vietnam vets being spat upon as they returned from Vietnam. I’ve never quite believed those stories – would YOU spit on a man who has been trained in several dozen ways to kill in hand-to-hand combat? – but would agree that such treatment of a man returning from a war, just or unjust, was reprehensible. A vile politician doesn’t trump the honor and courage of a soldier.

But the ones who committed torture, the ones who set dogs on prisoners, or stripped and humiliated them, or stomped on their holy books, and who sometimes raped and burned and murdered their prisoners – they should be spat upon. 

And the President who started this war on a lie, and who promoted the beatings and tortures and other atrocities in the name of that war – he should be spat upon.

It would do nothing to lift the cloud that has descended upon America this Memorial Day. Only time, and a retreat from the Gulags and the bombings of innocent civilians will do that. 

But it will show the world that Americans are better than the scum who torture, or the scum who sent these low people to torture.

But on this day, remember above all that most men and women in uniform are conscientious, brave, noble. Even when sent into ill-advised wars, they are doing it for you, hopefully so you won’t promote capricious imprisonments and torture and war for false reasons.



Below are some poems that came out of an even bigger pig’s mire than Iraq: World War I.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


The Latin title of this poem means:
"Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country."
(From Horace, Odes, III. ii. 13) 

NOTE: Owen was killed on 11/11/18, hours before the Armistice took effect. He had served in the trenches for four years.

Break of Day in the Trenches

Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -- what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe --
Just a little white with the dust.

June 1916

For The Fallen

Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

The Rainbow

Leslie Coulson