In Memoriam

The present Memorial Day likely had its quieter beginnings in the annual “Decoration Days” observed at cemeteries in the agrarian and mountainous south often during late spring, prior to this country’s Civil War, and which provided an opportunity for families to come together in a known location for the remembrance of loved ones lost, both distantly and more recently.

Memorial Day has changed a bit from those earlier times when now more often than not, some like to get noisy, get wild, get on with fireworks as prelude to the raucous celebration of this country’s beginning, a little more than a month distant. Perhaps the period in which we find ourselves now mired, prods us to get real, as well.

But the celebratory noise we intend to make might more appropriately be raised as an alarm, possibly representing a death knell for the erosion of our allegiance to the greater founding truths that animated and informed this nation’s birth. It wasn’t very long ago that honorable men and women felt obliged to utter the truth as they saw it. Now some notable figures in our government have been officially appointed and enlisted to lend their voices to the obscuring of reality, and willingly endorse mendacity of the worst kind in its stead.

 There is a worrisome, demeaning presence on the world’s stage, and we are responsible. 

However, may we tell the truth? Is it safe? It is a regrettable given that an attempt to do so can be dangerous, in the face of frightfully ignorant men and women who arm themselves with bricks and brass knuckles and baseball bats; who threaten and bleat nearly incoherently, attempting to silence the recitation of verifiable facts, choosing distortion or outright falsehood instead. They seek to mute any promulgation of earnest protest and reasonable discussion, in calamitous preference for the perfidy which issues forth from our president’s strident mouth, and is abetted by his minions, unabated.

There is a worrisome, demeaning presence on the world’s stage, and we are responsible. It is a lonely difficult job locally to signal the alert, surrounded by a surprisingly large contingent who venerate our president, despite the prevarication, obfuscation, and outright lying that he essays and indulges in a near hourly stream of falsity. How could so many otherwise rational people fall victim to the sad insidious death of their faculty for reason?

Today we attempt to remember and to honor this country’s Veterans of Foreign Wars, those brave men and women who gave their lives to protect something that our current president only wishes he understood. But does this Memorial Day portend a more ominous, sinister meaning for our particular moment in American history?

“Make America great again.” A phrase that when falling like spittle from the president’s lips sounds more like a mocking desecration than an obligation, or a moral duty, or a hope, or a remembrance. For he asks us by his own reprehensible behavior to ignore the principles upon which this nation was founded.

His neglect and apparent rejection of the rule of law and ethical convention makes me feel shame. How can a man who produces epic national and international embarrassment on a daily basis, lead us anywhere but headlong into disillusion, disenchantment, disenfranchisement, disinterest, and disintegration? If we remain mute in the face of such a callous, cynical rejection of our common ethical heritage, are we not then likely and deservedly to be charged with complicity, of consent through silence?

We stand to reap the final demoralizing reward springing forth from the cult of personality like a rotting fruit; and it is a very bitter, putrid thing indeed that we may be enjoined and compelled to swallow. It is a poison of unnatural consequence that is part and parcel of the natural progression from the sublime veneration of the transcendent, to the orgiastic and onanistic celebration of the lowercase self; the hedonistic folly of religious materialism, and the nihilistic worship of existentialism.

It is an animated, angry theory of non-consequence, writ unavoidably large across the national psyche, the prevailing zeitgeist of self-congratulation, in a uniquely American aping of the very British philosophy distilled within the phrase, “I’m okay, Jack.” I’ve got mine. To hell with yours. Perhaps this is a better slogan to be written upon the banner of our leader’s intentions. Without a doubt, he would have many adherents. There is no dearth of those who buttress the weak ramparts of our folly-driven assumptions and assertions with the only real and enduring legacy of the fear festering at the heart of the fatuous and the specious: violence in support of deceit, as though honor and righteousness have no value in the marketplace of ideas.

How else can the moronic express their fealty to faulty logic and their xenophobic loathing of everything that does not resemble the two-dimensional image greeting them daily upon the flat, endless plain of their paranoid self-referential reflection? Is this what comes of venerating sloganism over substance; of elevating the common and the mean to the regal; of embracing monosyllabic ranting as wholly preferable to thoughtful, reasoned dialog?

“I do not need to look. I will not be forced to see. I am quite content in my willful ignorance. My ‘world’ view is narrow enough to give me joy, and the strength to leap to my wholly satisfying facile, self-serving conclusions, thank you very much.”

It would not be hyperbolic to declare that our henna-headed addle-brained narcissistic “leader” has no clothes; and though he may revel in the freedom that the naked feel by flaunting their pudgy nude selves in the face of established social convention, I am reminded only of babies, whose bottoms are soiled, and who scream unremittingly for the breast, and who require many years of careful nurturing and guidance and love and punishment, to evince even a narrow chance of gaining the wholly uncertain status of the adult. Alas, as has become abundantly clear, time and age alone often prove insufficient to produce the desired results.

 Let no one assert that we allowed our moral alarm to be overwhelmed by the impotent belief that others will speak for us. 

I appeal to anybody whose dismay mimics or approaches my own to join me, our voices raised in alarm, and without reluctance to declare that we know this to be but a lamentable, tenuous phase; and that our shared values, consisting of unifying truths that outnumber by far those paltry goads and encumbrances that seek our disunion, shall allow us to overcome the attempt to subvert the ideals that have allowed our country thus far to endure.

Let us resolve that we may trust in what is just, declaring the truth as we see it. Surely others will listen if we are bold enough to give it voice. Fear often remains mute in the face of maleficence; but we must be brave enough to denounce the misbegotten nature of our present historical predicament, exposing it for the chimera of deceit and cynicism that it represents.

Let no one assert that we allowed our moral alarm to be overwhelmed by the impotent belief that others will speak for us, and that we were not obligated to proclaim our rejection of all things dishonest or ignoble. We must never pander to the self-negating hope that someone else will shoulder our burden. The old Quaker phrase, “Speak truth to power,”  is evocative of the best in us, given voice. Not so many years ago now, the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984), raised a postwar reminder of the danger of apathy in the service of expediency, an inexorable path to anarchy, when he penned the following words…

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

History is agnostic, insofar as it has lessons from which we may learn, provided catatonic national hubris of the sort that believes “It can’t happen here,”  does not prevail. There is but one family, one species of human being that populates this fragile planet and its equally tenuous systems of governance – homo sapiens – and there is nothing that can divide our interdependent, genetically indivisible family, beyond a lamentable, nonsensical resolve to grant the petty and the preening and the pompous and the preposterous a significance in the face of truth that righteously it can never either earn or deserve.