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Leave No Stone Unturned

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Memorial Day as a kid meant traveling long hours in the car with my family – over the years three, and then four siblings swimming around for more than eight hours in the back of the land whale known as the Chrysler 300 station wagon.

We’d crawl out of that avocado-colored earthbound leviathan like so many chewed-up Jonahs, reeking of tuna fish sandwiches, exhausted but ready for fresh air and sunshine, hot dogs and flag waving, candy thrown from the local firetruck along the day’s celebratory parade route.

Nobody was ready for my uncle, though, not ever. Let’s call him Ralph since he has always reminded me a bit of the hard right conservative character in the 1970s cartoon, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. Meld Ralph with Norman Lear’s Archie Bunker and you’d have a pretty good bead on my uncle’s persona.

Uncle Ralph — my great-uncle, being my grandfather’s younger brother — would’ve been among the other local veterans marching in the parade from the township hall to the cemetery at the opposite end of town. He’d have dusted off his dress uniform for the occasion though it had become a bit snug around the middle. I avoided getting too close to the man to see if his green wool serge had any moth holes as I suspected it might.

The man was a hard ass, no doubt about it. He was a dick to everyone around him. I don’t know what his long-suffering wife saw in the man or how she managed to stick it out with him for his lifetime apart from their intense Catholicism and their five kids. Nor was he less difficult with other family outside of his wife and kids; he’d screwed several family members with real estate deals he cooked up. Don’t get my mom started about him, yeesh – you’ll draw back with a bloody stump where your ear once was.

But on Memorial Day every year, on arrival at the cemetery, that snapping turtle of a man softened like ice cream on a summer’s day. Watching him stand at attention as the trumpeter played Taps and the flag was raised, you could see in his face something wordless and deep. It remained with him as he visited the veterans’ headstones in the cemetery, fussing with the flags and flowers on each burial plot.

I never saw this timeworn anguish in his face when he dealt with his quadriplegic son, or with his other son who’d tried to commit suicide. His hardness only cracked in the cemetery where his cohort was buried.

Whatever happened during his service in World War II molded him, made him that aggressive man who hid a fathomless sorrow beneath his rigidity. I wish I’d been brave enough as a kid to ask him right then, in the cemetery, what he was thinking about during the ceremony and afterward among the graves.

I don’t think his own brothers with whom he was very close even knew what Ralph had buried so long ago. They only talked about him with their spouses and the rest of the family as that mean son-of-a-bitch.

It’s a story which will never be revealed now that all of his generation in my family have passed on.

I’m thinking of you Uncle Ralph, our family’s anti-fascist, on this Memorial Day. I’m glad your burden has been laid down with you, and you didn’t live long enough to become compromised by today’s right-wing ideology.

~ ~ ~

My uncle came to mind when I read this article about a Black Civil War veteran Hiram White who lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and only now has a headstone thanks to the efforts and generosity of another Yooper.

He wasn’t the only Black Civil War veteran in the U.P.; Samuel Cary lived in Negaunee for 30-plus years after the Civil War. Both White and Cary shared a profession, though – they were barbers in their respective parts of the U.P., separated by 60 miles or so.

I can’t help wonder what Uncle Ralph would have made of the new headstone for White’s previously unmarked grave, or that of the other Black Civil War veterans who have more recently received long-overdue headstones.

My uncle was racist, to be frank and blunt; I don’t know if he would have been generous about these Black veterans. Ralph’s the one member of my mom’s extended family I can recall using the n-word, which is saying something since there were more than 120 people in the family. He was never openly so toward my dad or my siblings though there were never any warm fuzzies between Ralph and my dad. Ralph respected my dad’s military service even if he might not have been welcoming toward the one brown-skinned person in the family, but dad wasn’t Black but Asian-Pacific Islander.

It’s this one character flaw which makes me think Uncle Ralph would have been susceptible to Trump-y fascism antithetical to his military service. His racism could have been played to crack his anti-fascist history.

I’m glad time and entropy kept Ralph from becoming more bigoted than he was.

~ ~ ~

Two geopolitical challenges might have limited Uncle Ralph’s slide into fascism had he lived long enough. While Nixon as a GOP president might have been able to go to China, Ralph wouldn’t have felt comfortable with the relationship the U.S. has had with China.

Part of this would have been borne of his racism, I’m sure. But part of it would have been Ralph’s staunch pro-defense pro-democracy politics. He would have been deeply concerned about importing any defense products from China. In this I think his skepticism would have been like that of Sen. John McCain.

I doubt my uncle would ever have been comfortable as a GOP voter with supporting Russian aggression, either.

I can hear Uncle Ralph even now, sunburned to a lobster-red crisp, peeling the ring top open on his umpteenth Schlitz next to a blazing bonfire, barking at the top of his lungs about “those goddamned commies” while talking with my other uncles and male cousins about world events during beach-side family reunions.

At the time he would have been fulminating about North Vietnam; I know I avoided these particular family discussions because even as early as age seven I did not believe military action in Vietnam was good.

Today he would have been chomping at the bit to do more to stem Putin’s overreach, and I can’t say that I’d disagree though I wouldn’t advocate anything more than increasing support for Ukraine.

Again, I wish I’d been brave enough to ask him what he thought then about global politics; he might have illuminated my understanding of their evolution and right-wing positioning since Nixon. But when we’re kids we’re rarely encouraged to engage our curiosity and interview older family; we weren’t often offered safe situations in which queries were permitted and entertained respectfully by adults.

Adults, for that matter even now, aren’t reminded there are histories to be shared and life lessons to pass on, ones which might shape the future. There’s no general curriculum of adulthood which tells them to make sure they teach the children well how to avoid the errors of the past.

Because of Uncle Ralph and the other members of my family whose histories weren’t recorded and shared, I’m going to make an effort this month to document another oldster’s personal story. My father-in-law was born 10 years after Ralph was, missed World War II, but he still has so much to share about the 1930s-1970s that my kids and me and even my spouse don’t know about.

Everything I was afraid to ask Uncle Ralph about his military service I will ask my FIL, documenting it to share with my kids and grandkids to come. Doing so is my duty to the future, a fight requiring no weapons to prepare my kin and others for what’s ahead.

This Memorial Day I’m thinking of my great-uncle and I’m grateful for what he taught me even as the old hard ass frightened the bejabbers out of me as a kid.

He’s taught me Memorial Day is about memories. Capture them now while you can, because they are history.

~ ~ ~

Let it make no difference to thee whether thou art cold or warm, if
thou art doing thy duty; and whether thou art drowsy or satisfied
with sleep; and whether ill-spoken of or praised; and whether dying
or doing something else. For it is one of the acts of life, this act
by which we die: it is sufficient then in this act also to do well
what we have in hand.

Look within. Let neither the peculiar quality of anything nor its
value escape thee.

All existing things soon change, and they will either be reduced to
vapor, if indeed all substance is one, or they will be dispersed.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6

Memorialize This

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[NB: Byline check. /~Rayne]

Today’s All-American holiday didn’t come about in one fell swoop. Its origins have been a bone of contention — did it begin in the South? did it start in the North? Was it an African American celebration?

Depending on who you ask you may find yourself in a discussion not unlike those surrounding Confederate statuary — fraught with past and present politics.

And good old-fashioned racism.

The first large formal observation of this holiday was marked by African Americans of Charleston, South Carolina in 1865 when their Civil War dead were reburied.

Read more about it at Zinn Education Project.

Most Americans aren’t aware of this history, not even lifelong residents of Charleston. The reason is racism manifest through cultural erasure.

I live in the first state to declare Memorial Day a statewide holiday. In 1871 Michigan set aside what was then called Decoration Day to pay tribute to its war dead. We lost more than 14,000 of the 90,000 men sent to fight in the south — about 3.5% of the state’s population lost to the Civil War.

A Union soldier from Michigan wrote to his wife,

The more I learn of the cursed institution of slavery, the more I feel willing to endure, for its final destruction … After this war is over, this whole country will undergo a change for the better … Abolishing slavery will dignify labor; that fact of itself will revolutionize everything … Let Christians use all their influence to have justice done to the black man.

He was killed not long after by a Confederate sniper.

We sent this man and others, our flesh and blood, to fight for what is right, to defend a more perfect union, to defeat the denigration of fellow Americans then enslaved. We’ve allowed the lingering toxins of the Confederacy to obscure why it was this nation went to war — not because of states’ rights but because of an economic system dependent upon the reduction of humans to mere chattel.

We’ve sent our family members to defeat oppression in other wars, too many paying the ultimate sacrifice.

Now we’ve strayed from fighting for the ideals our country was founded upon. What was once defense against oppression has become offense for corporations, serving the US ill over the long run. It has become an excuse to create profits for the military industrial complex while ignoring the exercise of soft power through diplomacy. Our friends and loved ones who’ve died or have been injured or sickened for life are merely collateral damage along the way.

The latest threats against Iran are a perfect example in a string of poor leadership. Who benefits from military action against Iran? Or against beleaguered Venezuela? How would military action against either nation support our values?

One could see a case for highly-limited, tightly-focused action if North Korea pointedly prepares to attack the U.S. or its allies. But if North Korea simply develops weapons for its own defense given its proximity to both China and Russia, what then? Should we place our family members in harm’s way over North Korea’s right to self-defense?

Why is our diplomacy so weak that we don’t really know what Kim Jong-un’s aims are? Why are we tolerating the crazed tweets of a malignant narcissist as diplomacy when we have blood and treasure on the line?

It’s beyond time we really look at the price our nation has paid in flesh and blood and honor the ultimate sacrifices made by reassessing our values and recommitting to them — and not just on a day set aside for observation.

A rational and effective reassessment will also look at the fitness of the president to realize our values in the execution of their duties.

This is an open thread. (Featured image on front page: Korean War Memorial, National Mall, by Brian Kraus via Unsplash.)

On Chris Hayes & America’s Fallen Heroes

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I will admit I was watching the F1 Grand Prix de Monaco this morning and not Up With Chris Hayes on MSNBC. It turns out I missed some controversy. I was referred to the matter by Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway. Mataconis argued that it seemed like the wrong tone for Memorial Day.

The key quote from the article Doug cited, which was from Mediate, quoted Hayes where he says he feels:

…uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

Chris Hayes is a young and very smart talent in the progressive media, and his show has been a beyond rare breath of fresh air generally in what is the pitiful morass of cable news programming. Hayes quickly showed why by referring critics to the video at right, which does indeed present a much fuller and more nuanced take on the issue. As Jeremy Scahill noted, Hayes is being mauled for taking such a deeper and more nuanced look at the issue of praise for war. I agree wholeheartedly with Jeremy.

But, still, I have some, granted also nuanced, qualms.

Contrast Hayes tact with that of Olivier Knox of Yahoo News on Friday:

Memorial Day Weekend: My thoughts inevitably drift to visits to the Normandy Beaches. More moving each passing year. Merci.
…
When I was a kid, it was hard to appreciate the “full measure of devotion.” Also my French grandparents hadn’t fully briefed me.

There is a palpable difference in tone between the initial takes of Knox and Hayes. While I originally instinctively gravitated toward the Knox take, the more I chew on it, I think Scahill has a point, and the more I think my knee jerk reaction to Hayes was a bit too reflexive and shallow. Here is why.

It is a generational thing to some extent, and the wider the age gap in people reacting to this, the generally wider the potential for adverse reaction. That, of course, is not totally the crux of the biscuit (as Frank Zappa would say), but I think it may be a large part of it.

Chris Hayes touched on a critical and under appreciated point: there is far too much cheerleading for war propagated through obligatory honor of the souls the powers that be send to fight the wars. It does cloud and mask the reality of what is transpiring on the greater moral and humanitarian stage, and does so very much to the detriment of society and the relevant discussion. That is just a fact in my book.

By the same token, the older voices among us, even those of us who grew up with the mess that was Vietnam, still grew up in the halo years of WW II, with the remnants of WW I that preceded it. When I think of Memorial Day, it is under a mental framework cast in those terms, that was still the framework conveyed in the 60’s and, even if lesser, still in the 70’s and 80’s. Vietnam was the aberration, not the norm, for a very long time when considering war and “war heroes”.

And that was me, a kid who mercifully avoided the draft and never served. I think the feelings could, and may well be, even stronger among those who did serve or, like Olivier Knox, who have land and families free today because of the last devotion expended on the beaches of Normandy or Okinawa.

To an older generation, and the differently situated, Memorial Day exists to honor true heroes. American soldiers who died so that you, me, Chris Hayes and everyone else may all have the discussions we do. The fact they gave what they did allows that. And, yes, they ARE heroes.

It is indeed a complex dynamic. Could Chris Hayes have exercised a bit more rhetorical discretion; no question. And he would be wise to not paint it quite as much as he does so primarily in terms of Afghanistan and, presumably, if not mentioned, Iraq (leaving aside Yemen and our other, um, areas of interest/conflict); there is a much larger and older framework, as Hayes himself cogently noted in his lead in.

But move beyond the patina of insensitivity, and Chris Hayes was quite right. We need desperately to unhinge the valor of our troops from the moral squalor of our leaders. Memorial Day may be a touchy time to hear that, but it needs to be said.

[Notice of Erratum: I would like to make quite clear that I do not think Chris Hayes and Olivier Knox are at any odds here; not at all. I simply found their initial takes demonstrative of the greater depth of the issue and discussion here, and illustrative of the point. Thanks to my friend Olivier for pointing that out]