Remembrance of things past

Yeah, it’s undoubtedly been a lousy week for people concerned with learning from history, with leadership as a force for good and with being able to show progress as a recompense for the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of the ideals of freedom, justice and equality.

And here we are, at the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the time 98 years ago when the physically exhausted and morally bankrupt Second Reich implemented a cease-fire agreement from the Allies. This day always saddens me, and this year more than most, because we’ve just elected about the most morally bankrupt creature I’ve ever seen to high office, and our service members will be on the literal front lines of his cowboy policies.

On and off the battle field, at home and in foreign fields, men and women have for more than 200 years willingly gone into harm’s way in defense of something that transcends race, religion, politics or gender. That something would be the form of government established by those upstart former colonists in 1787.

As you may know, every uniformed service member takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States—not a President, not a state, but the figurative Pentateuch of all laws that evolved from it. Tell me, Ozymandias, where else the law is valued so highly as here?

(Or it was until the Chaos Monkey threatened to hack great swaths across it, both foreign and domestic, between his bluster about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it, and his announced intention to go to war against Iran and “take their oil”. We’re getting closer than ever to looking like the kind of country that spends a November night burning synagogues, smashing shop windows and then making thevictims pay for it. He’d view that as smart business.)

But these hundreds of thousands of Americans—natives, immigrants, Sikhs, Muslims, Baptists, Buddhists, urban, rural, north-south, bi-coastal, draftees or volunteers—put their lives on the line to defend those principles of that “more perfect union”.

Veterans Day is when we nominally honor those who chose to walk this path—to be the instruments of policy. In reality, though, we don’t do a whole hell of a lot of honoring, outside of the DC-Arlington National Cemetery area. And I have to say that I’m a bit worn out after this recent campaign. So I’ll fall back on Mother England’s Remembrance Day customs, especially in this year of the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.

This year, after a long hiatus, I was able to get poppies; the British Embassy had them, so on Election Day I took the bus out there and got five of them. I find it odd that my manager, with degrees from Amherst and Harvard, professed not to know the significance. He pointed to the one I was wearing yesterday and said, "It's very pretty..."

Yeah. Okay.

But I’ll take comfort in “Flowers of the Forest,” the powerful centuries-old piece that began life as a lament for Scots slain by Englishmen. But because Highland regiments formed the backbone of the British army in so many wars, it has been transmuted to a universal tune that accompanies the bodies of British soldiers home to their final rest.

It has had rather a workout in recent years, in Afghanistan and Iraq. But here it appears against the background of memorials to the losses of the Somme. And if for no other reason, that would render me a sobbing wreck.

This year—even more so than in the past—I just wish we were farther along in learning from history’s disasters, and not so apparently dead set on repeating them.

Peace out.