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May 28, 2006
Mark Steyn on Memorial Day
Her Majesty's best foreign correspondent reposted his two-year-old take on Memorial Day, and it's as worthwhile a read today as it was in 2004.
These passages struck particularly hard.
Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory" are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862. 1843-1864.
In my local cemetery, there's a monument over three graves, forebears of my hardworking assistant, though I didn't know that the time I first came across them. Turner Grant, his cousin John Gilbert and his sister's fiance Charles Lovejoy had been friends since boyhood and all three enlisted on the same day. Charles died on March 5, 1863, Turner on March 6, and John on March 11. Nothing splendid or heroic. They were tentmates in Virginia, and there was an outbreak of measles in the camp.
For some reason, there was a bureaucratic mixup and the army neglected to inform the families. Then, on their final journey home, the bodies were taken off the train at the wrong town. It was a Saturday afternoon and the stationmaster didn't want the caskets sitting there all weekend. So a man who knew where the Grants lived offered to take them up to the next town and drop them off on Sunday morning.
When he arrived, the family was at church, so he unloaded the coffins from his buggy and left without a word or a note to anyone. Imagine coming home from Sunday worship and finding three caskets waiting on the porch. Imagine being young Caroline Grant, and those caskets contain the bodies of your brother, your cousin and the man to whom you're betrothed.
That's a hell of a story behind the bald dates on three tombstones. If it happened today, maybe Caroline would be on Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric demanding proper compensation, and the truth about what happened, and why the politicians were covering it up. Maybe she'd form a group of victims' families. Maybe she'd call for a special commission to establish whether the government did everything it could to prevent disease outbreaks at army camps. Maybe, when they got around to forming the commission, she'd be booing and chanting during the officials' testimony, as several of the 9/11 families did during Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony.
[...]
New York . . . resisted the Civil War my small town's menfolk were so eager to enlist in. The big city was racked by bloody riots against the draft. And you can sort of see the rioters' point. More than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War -- or about 1.8 percent of the population. Today, if 1.8 percent of the population were killed in war, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.
But that's the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren't a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screw-ups worth re-examining, but they weren't a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn't lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.
There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites -- from the deranged former vice president down -- want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky-clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we're supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.
Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America. Even in its grief, my part of New Hampshire understood that 141 years ago. We should, too.
It's hard to imagine that this nation of hyper-sensitive would-be victims was once willing to fight and die in numbers staggering to the modern reader, for things as ephemeral as freedom -- freedom from colonial rule, freedom from the moral scourge of slavery.
In a material sense, we're a much richer nation now than we were then, but we're morally, spiritually and patriotically impoverished, when measured against our 19th-century forebearers.
Posted by Mike Lief at May 28, 2006 01:15 PM
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Comments
Al Gore: "We're just going to love and understand our enemies."
John Kerry: "We have absolutely no enemies."
Posted by: Vermont Neighbor at May 28, 2006 09:51 PM
While everyone pigs out at family barbecues on Memorial Day I fast. I don't eat a damn thing because it makes me sick to think about my brothers in arms being killed and wounded in foreign lands while I make a jolly old holiday about it. On their own, my kids have joined me this year in my annual Memorial Day fast. (They'll probably make it to about 1800) I was in the Persian Gulf War. The current situation in Iraq is a whole different ball of wax. I love our soldiers. I'll be praying for them today. On the other hand, I won't be praying for any Iraqis. I don't care what side of the fence they are on "this week." They don't deserve the sacrifices our troops are making for them. They can go to hell.
Posted by: Red Stater at May 29, 2006 10:04 AM