There’s a lot of coverage—rightly so—of the 75th anniversary
of the D-Day landings, that spectacular operation that drove a stake through the
wall of Hitler’s Festung Europa and began the 11-month slog to Germany. The
ranks of the veterans of Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah are thinning and
growing frail; they are, after all, in their 90s.
There was a ceremony yesterday at Portsmouth, one of the embarkation
points in England, to mark that side of the operation, and there’s another one
today at Juno Beach, near Courseulles-sur-Mer, one of the two British landing
sites. Most of the heads of state understand the solemnity and importance of
remembering these long-ago events; sadly, the one representing the United
States does not.
I don’t know what’s on the agenda, but it would be a good thing if
the pols visited one of the three military cemeteries within a few kilometers
of one another near Omaha Beach: Colleville-sur-mer,
American; Bayeux,
British; and La Cambe,
German. I’ve walked them all, several times.
The American
cemetery is situated on the bluff above Omaha Beach. You can stand at the edge and look
down on the scene of the slaughter. And wonder how the hell they ever made
it up to where you are. The graves are marked with white marble crosses,
with the occasional Star of David interspersed. It’s quiet, usually, except for
the wind. More than 9300 men lie there—not all fallen at Normandy, but
congregated there in the fellowship of death.
The British cemetery, run by the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission, is in the heart of Bayeux, the town they took on 7 June. The
headstones are like those at all CWGC graveyards—identically-sized slabs of
white marble engraved with the soldier’s name, regiment and date of
death (if known; otherwise a cross and “known but to God”
inscribed); a centrally-located Cross of Sacrifice (tall marble cross
with a sword inset), and a Stone of Remembrance, inscribed
“Their Name Liveth Forevermore”. More than 4000 Brits, Commonwealth, Poles,
French and others lie there.
La Cambe is
outside Bayeux; you get to it down a quiet road that seems to have no other purpose
but to lead you to the dead. The cemetery is maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge,
the German counterpart to the CWGC. It’s not as large space-wise as the two
Allied graveyards. That’s because when you look at the inscriptions on the
black metal markers set into the earth, you see there are often two to five men
buried in a single spot. Plus, there are the nearly 300 known and unknown
under the central mound. More than 21,000 men lie there.
The thing that
struck me almost from the first in these three cemeteries was the ages on the
markers—you almost never see anyone who’d reached 24. Most were in the
19-22-year age range. When you’d expect them to be in college, or working their
first jobs.
I’ve often wondered what the world lost through those early
deaths. What music never was composed? What scientific breakthroughs never
made? What civic gains, feats of sportsmanship, family enrichment just
disappeared from the future in June 1944?
That, of course,
is in addition to the anguish and sorrow that engulfed their
families. Parents, siblings, wives, children—bereft and left alone
to sort out a world gone mad. No one to repair the gutter or fix the bike;
to guide a grandchild’s hands tying a bow knot; to comfort a friend; to surprise
a lover with flowers.
It had to be
done—it always seems to need doing. Especially since we see the resurgence of
fascism and totalitarianism all around us. But take a few moments this week to
think on those 30,000 lives cut short in Normandy 75 years ago. The boys of
D-Day who put their lives on the line for their generation and those
that followed.
Yom
HaShoah starts at sundown today and runs to sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set
aside by the state of Israel to commemorate the nearly six million Jews
systematically murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the 1930s and
1940s. At 1000 local time, everything will come to a halt across Israel, and
people will stand silent and still, remembering those deaths. It’s an
astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I cannot imagine it in real
life.
Rather
than say anything myself, I’m sharing part of the opening lecture Elie Wiesel gave
at an international symposium in 1974 at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine
in New York. It’s included in his article, “Art and Culture after the Holocaust”,
published in CrossCurrents.
“Let us tell tales. Let us tell
tales—all the rest can wait; all the rest must wait.
“Let us tell tales—that is our
primary obligation. Commentaries will have to come later, lest they replace or
becloud what they mean to reveal.
Tales of children so wise and so
old. Tales of old men mute with fear. Tales of victims welcoming death as an
old acquaintance. Tales that bring man close to the abyss and beyond—and others
that lift him up to heaven and beyond. Tales of despair, tales of longing.
Tales of immense flames reaching out to the sky, tales of night consuming life
and hope and eternity.
“Let us tell tales so as to
remember how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming evil. Let us tell
tales so as not to allow the executioner to have the last word. The last word
belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness to capture it, shape it,
transmit it and keep it as a secret, and then communicate that secret to
others.”
The
thing is, when we stop telling those tales, the Nazis win—generation after
generation.
One of the major social and economic stimulus programs that were
implemented after the Second World War was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of
1944, better known as the G.I. Bill. It was the country’s way of saying thank
you to veterans returning from the war by giving them access to academic and
vocational education (through tuition payments and living expense allowances), low-cost
mortgages and low-interest business loans.
The G.I. Bill (although not without its inequities) was one of the
true wonders of the post-war world. For many vets, it was their ticket into the
middle class for themselves and their children.
In 2008, Congress passed another bill, the Post-9/11 Veterans
Education Assistance Act, which was meant to update the G.I. Bill for the 21st
Century, with a focus on college education. But perhaps that bill should have
had some provision for also updating the Veterans Administration computer
system, because monies that should have been paid to veterans pursuing higher
education are not getting to them.
Because the 50-year-old
computer system…broke. The VA rejigged the formulas for payment
calculations, and the system couldn’t deal. There’s a lot of congressional and
VA hand-flapping going on. But no solutions.
Great way to close out the week of Veterans Day, eh?
As a New Military historian, I’m a big proponent of oral histories;
they flesh out the statistics, government documents and other components of learned
monographs. The Imperial War Museum in the UK has done an excellent job of interviewing
survivors of the First and Second World Wars, which means we now have an
invaluable repository of first-person accounts of experiences from men and
women who have since died.
In the United States, we have…the Veterans’ Voices project from NPR’s
StoryCorps.
I love listening to StoryCorps
on Friday mornings—a couple of minutes of two people chatting about some aspect
of their lives. A mother and son; two friends; survivors of a school shooting—it’s
a microcosm of life. VeteransVoices is a subset of StoryCorps, focused on life
filtered through military service.
One of my all-time favorites is the one from February this year
(around Valentine’s Day): Vietnam vet Jerry Nadeau and WWII vet John Banvard,
who were flying a little under the radar when eight years ago they moved
as a couple into a veterans’ home in Chula Vista. It’s just wonderful.
On Veterans Day this year the Google Doodle connected
to five #VeteransVoices stories. Turns out Google, YouTube and StoryCorps
are teaming up to help expand the collection of veterans’ stories. You can
download the #VeteransVoices app for iOS, Android and Kindle, and use the native
prompts to guide you in your interview.
Here’s an example:
StoryCorps recordings are archived with the Library of Congress,
where anyone can access them. That means that the stories of these vets are
available to everyone. I hope that—as with the IWM’s archive—these interviews
can help future generations understand the humanity of military services.
The Brits do a tremendous job of honoring the sacrifices made in
wars of the Twentieth Century. Not—generally—contemporaneously, or as a
long-term thing; it wasn’t until the social welfare state emerged from the
destruction of the Second World War that Britain’s veterans received help with
jobs, housing and healthcare. (This of course shrinks during Tory governments.)
But when it comes to putting on a ceremony to acknowledge those who gave their
full measure of devotion, there’s nothing like having a Royal Family oversee
the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph.
But around the country people also mark what’s known as
Remembrance Sunday (which coincided this year, fortuitously, with the actual anniversary
of Armistice), with ceremonies at village memorials (which started out listing
the names of the dead from 1914-1918, but then had to add on those lost
1939-1945) and local churches. On Remembrance Sunday church bells are
half-muffled in mourning, as in this ring from Remembrance Sunday six years
ago:
And in some churches, in the minutes before 1100, the tenor is
rung up, as in this clip from Exeter Cathedral:
At Holy Trinity Church in Cookham, Berkshire, my friend MLD and
her fellow ringers take this on as a solemn duty. MLD tolled the tenor by
herself for the fifteen minutes up to 1100, which is exhausting, being not only very heavy but for tolling you have to ring very slowly and hold the bell up—you see at Exeter they need three to do it. But
she’s glad to take it on.
This year, being the centenary, Holy Trinity augmented its
Remembrance service with some heartrending symbols.
As in many other parishes
and villages, people knitted poppies to be displayed—from John McCrae’s poem
that begins, “In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses row on
row.” HTC decorated the sanctuary with these:
In addition to the knitted ones, they displayed a poppy that was part
of the gut-wrenching Blood-swept
Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London from August to
November 2014, commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of war. This was one
of the nearly 900,000 ceramic poppies that filled the Tower’s moat like a gush
of blood.
But the piece that I absolutely cannot view except through tears
is the Perspex silhouette soldier “sitting” in the pew. There were five of
these, each representing a man from the parish who left for war and never
returned.
Had I been in that sanctuary in the presence of those ghosts, I’d
have been unable to sing or follow the service.
(Photos taken by one of MLD’s fellow ringers, who I hope will not
object to me appropriating them.)
I’ll leave you with one more brilliant evocation from our British brothers—a
stellar Twitter thread capturing the universal truth about how we Anglo-Americans view our militaries,
as voiced by Rudyard Kipling.
One hundred years ago today, representatives of
the Second German Reich—their armies exhausted, their Kaiser abdicated, their people
starving, their cities roiling with revolution—agreed to surrender terms
dictated by Allied leaders. At 0500 in a railroad car in the Compiègne forest,
they signed the Armistice, which went into effect six hours later.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month, guns fell silent across Europe, and after more than four years
of total war, the nations stood in stunned relief. World War I gave us chemical warfare (Germany
first, then the rest to keep up with the Huns), genocide (Armenians, by Turks),
aerial bombing of civilian targets (Germans on French and British cities), unrestricted
(meaning: shooting at everything in the water) submarine warfare (Germany),
introduction of tanks (Britain)—all the mod cons of Twentieth Century life.
They’d be amplified by technological advancements in the next global
conflagration, and then refined in the “smaller” wars of the past 60 years.
In
my opinion, it was started and fought for reasons of empire—acquiring,
defending, expanding what you had or thought you deserved to have. Military and
political leaders were ignorant (woefully or willfully? I don’t know; maybe
some of both) of what advances in technology were about to do to warfare, and
they were criminally slow in realizing what was happening and what it was
costing as the war wore on.
And
after they’d all been in it for a couple of years, and had been depleting their
treasuries, exhausting their citizens, consuming their resources, killing off
their young men in their tens of thousands on a daily basis—well, a surreal
stubbornness seemed to grip them all. Essentially, the argument was, “We’ve
already spent this much and lost that much, now we have to
stay in it until we win.”
Right
up until almost the very end, the Germans were still marking out territories on
maps of Western Europe that they intended to annex upon victory—parts of
France, Belgium, Luxembourg to which a noble and martial people like the
Teutons were entitled.
Meanwhile
the French and Brits had a slightly tighter grasp on the geopolitical
possibilities before them, and were secretly negotiating to carve up pieces of
the Middle East which they expected the Ottomans were going to lose control of.
They were haggling between themselves, you understand, not with any of the
peoples who actually, you know, lived in those areas. Oh, yeah, they were
making promises, to Arabs, to Jews, to Kurds; but those were measures of
expediency and not agreements between gentlemen such as the ones they made
among themselves. Meaning—not anything they really expected to have to honor.
And
so many, many of those imperial chickens have been coming home to roost ever
since those shots echoed through Sarajevo. World War I reverberated
throughout the Twentieth Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed
off much of the ruling-class youth in the nations of Western Europe, it
left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s
psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the
sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach
would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued.
But
we’re even now feeling the effects of what was known at the time as the Great
War. The nearly
farcical assassination that started the war laid a pretty straight
path to the collapse of the Russian government and the communist revolution.
Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and
his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and more than 70
years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.
The
viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the
dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations
payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more
ruinous indemnities from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of
Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Just think about that for a
minute: talk about sticking it to your defeated foe...) It was that whole
sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that settlement.
"Germany started it; the rest of us are victims."
The
Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary)
set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook
out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating
entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required
intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade. And if
they’re not actively committing acts of aggression against their neighbors at
the moment, they will be doing so as soon as they think they can get away with
it. This is not over.
The
Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire
along the lines that Britain and France had mapped out earlier in the war,
picking up choice parcels of real estate in the Middle East. As with the
Balkans, those arbitrary geographic divisions, ignorant or dismissive of
ethnic, religious or other loyalties of the resident peoples, are still
reverberating on the global stage.
Iran,
Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers
amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost
for more than 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being
produced.
Well, by 1918, German,
Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires were all shattered, although the
Soviet Union pretty well replaced the last one. (And since the break-up of the
Soviet empire in the 1990s, we see Putin attempting to rebuild the tsarist
holdings. If I were a Finn, a Latvian, an Estonian or a Lithuanian, I’d look at
Ukraine and be nervous.) The British
empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war.
And France—well, a steady retreat as well.
For the United States, it marked our emergence as a major
player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in
the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the
memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend
that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we
got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there
was no turning back.
For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off the First World
War. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the
20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a
movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched
on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert
Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal
obligations or of the actual cost of
wars) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to
storm the camps of the veterans of that war. But we still preferred to dismiss it from our collective memory.
Aside from emulating Britain and France in retrieving remains of an
unidentifiable soldier from the cemeteries of Northern France and interring
them at the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery (Britain’s
Unknown lies in Westminster Abbey; France’s beneath the Arc de Triomphe), we
scurried back and declined to join the League of Nations. America first, eh?
Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society,
however, although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that
was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to
call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months.
That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded
that all your people step up to the plate for a total war,
it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and send them back to the kitchen or
the rear of the bus forevermore.
The Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in
1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward
came in 1948 when Harry S Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981,
ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.
Truman had been an artillery captain with the American
Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.
This weekend in Europe, there are public and private commemorations
of the Armistice that was signed in Compiègne 100 years ago. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel
Macron unveiled a memorial there; Pierre Trudeau paid tribute to Canadian
soldiers at Vimy
Ridge. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly represented us at a ceremony
at the Aisne-Marne US military cemetery near the battlefield of Belleau Wood; Commander
Bone Spurs declined to venture out in the rain to honor the fallen. (Well, he is umbrella-challenged…)
It’s fortuitous that the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice
falls on Remembrance Sunday in Britain. The Royals and Commonwealth dignitaries
will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. There are no longer any survivors
from 1918, but veterans from World War II and subsequent wars will march (or be
wheeled) past. There will be two minutes of silence precisely at 1100, and then
half-muffled church bells around the country will toll for the fallen.
(Throughout the past four years, the Brits have done an amazing
job of honoring the war that broke the back of their empire. Starting in August
2014, with the Lights
Out campaign and the Blood-Swept
Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London, it progressed to
a poignant series of public and private commemorations of the centenary
of the opening of the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in 2016 that
included a performance art piece called We’re Here Because We’re Here of men in
WWI uniforms appearing at train stations across the country just as they would
have done on their way to Somme. And then there was the statue of the soldier sculpted
from Flanders mud, who melted under rain at Trafalgar Square a hundred
years on from the Battle of Passchendaele. Finally, for the past week there has
been a
light and sound installation in and around the Tower of 10,000 torches lit
each night by the Warders, accompanied by a new choral work.)
Also today there will be a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe at which
I hope to God that moral and physical coward 45 doesn’t shove any of the world
leaders out of his way as he impatiently waits for his meeting with Putin. At
least he’s not here desecrating Arlington.
Ah, well, perhaps I take these things too seriously. I’ve spent
too much time walking the battlefields and graveyards of Northern France and
Belgium internalizing the loss they represent. I can think of no more evocative
musical piece to commemorate this centenary than “Flowers of the Forest,” the
powerful centuries-old 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, renders me a sobbing wreck.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
I understand that 2017 was the worst year in in
modern history for mass shooting deaths in the United States, with 345 mass
shootings reported…by 1 November, according to the Gun Violence Archive. So 2018
has apparently responded with, “Hold my beer.”
By way of illustration, here are just three
graphics from that website.
Number of incidents of gun violence of all
types—mass shootings, domestic violence, accidental killings, etc., as of yesterday:
Number of mass shootings (which they define as four
or more victims, both killed and wounded), as of yesterday:
Number of deaths from gun violence, as of yesterday:
Keep in mind that we still have two months to go
before 2018 is out, with endless spewings from the Kleptocrat, his spawn and his
ilk to ratchet up the hatred that spills over into these red splotches.
Today is All Souls’ Day, the somber time when
Christians remember those who have departed in the faith. In some parishes, the
names of the dead are read out in services; for others it’s a private
remembrance. Being a California Christian, I’m not too fussed about the “in the
faith” part; I mourn all who have left this life, particularly those who did so
suddenly, and especially from violence.
The revolting massacre of worshippers at the
Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last Saturday, and the equally repulsive
murder of two black shoppers at a grocery store in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, the
same day (by a RWNJ who’d first tried to gain access to an African-American
church before heading down to the Kroger), are but the latest in a gush of such
killings since February 2017. The task of naming every victim—even just the
dead, leaving out the survivors—in that period is beyond me; I don’t even have
the heart to list all of October’s victims. I’ll just give you those who were
murdered last Saturday.
The Games of the XIX Olympiad were held in México
City fifty years ago this month. There was a lot of political overtone to the Games—for
one thing, they followed by less than two months the Soviet crushing of the
Prague Spring movement, and while there was no visible bloodshed (as had
happened in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 when the pool holding the
Soviet-Hungarian water polo match was red), there were real tensions.
It was also the time of the Black Power
movement, and one of the most iconic images of an Olympiad was of Tommie Smith
and John Carlos bowing their heads and giving the clenched fist Black Power
salute. They had finished first and third, respectively, in the 200 meter
sprint; Smith’s 19.83 second finish was a world record.
Photo by Angelo Cozzi
Smith and Carlos provoked massive controversy
with their gesture, but what’s not widely known (outside of Australia) is that
Peter Norman, the Aussie who finished second in the race, supported them
wholeheartedly, and his athletic career suffered for it.
Norman, from a devout Salvation Army Christian
family, deeply believed in human rights. The Americans had told him before the medal
ceremony what they intended to do, and he supported them fully. Carlos later
told a journalist that he’d expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes when they
told him. Instead, he said, “I saw love.”
At the ceremony, Norman wore a badge for the
Olympic Project for Human Rights he’d borrowed from another athlete as another
symbol of his support.
The controversy that enveloped Carlos and Smith
extended to Norman. Australia kept him out of Olympic competition, and he was
not even acknowledged in the 2000 Games held in Sydney. He died in 2006 of a
heart attack. Carlos and Smith were pallbearers at his funeral on 9 October,
which was declared Peter Norman Day.
In a 2012 interview, Carlos said, “There is no
one in Australia that should be honored, recognized, appreciated more than
Peter Norman for his humanitarian concerns, his character, his strength and his
willingness to be a sacrificial lamb for justice.”
In our current social climate where vicious
tribalism makes all the headlines, I’m finding it heartening to recall that
there are indeed individuals willing to stand (literally) for the right thing.
Well, blow me—it’s the
50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. And of peak intensity of the
Vietnam War. Expect a lot of retrospectives in the media (but no recognition
whatsoever from the Kleptocrat, who spent this period getting draft deferments
and testing the limits of prophylactics) on every possible aspect of these
phenomena. They’ll probably run longer than the real thing.
But on Saturday I was
in an organic market in NoVa that gives out free cups of coffees and teas
they’re featuring. I picked up a packet of one of the latter called “Russian
Caravan”, and the instant I opened it and got a sniff, I was whisked back to…somewhere.
At first, I couldn’t place where it was, but eventually I realized it was a
Russian deli in Los Angeles. I’d read about it in the Times, and bugged my mom to take me over there one Saturday. The
place had that same smoky, exotic aroma as the Russian Caravan tea bag. So
there I was—in Herndon, in childhood LA and in a tea house in Moscow, where I’ve
only been in my imagination—all at the same time.
I got to talking with
the coffee-tea woman about the experience, and we agreed that scents and music seem
to be the most powerful connectors to memory. (For Marcel Proust, it was
famously taste. But a strong component of taste is actually smell.) Because you
hear a song, and boom—you’re back
wherever you were, doing whatever you were doing, when you first heard it.
Ditto a sudden whiff of…something.
The smell of diesel
exhaust over wet pavement always triggers my first experience in Paris, when I
began my
pilgrimage to Santiago.
Constant Comment tea is
forever entwined with long conversations with my BFF in her cousin’s very
old-fashioned kitchen.
Someone on Twitter said
he was in a Bob Seger mood for the first time since he was 15, and “Fire Lake”
flashed onto my cortex. I felt the uncontrollable urge to put on my gypsy
leathers, and I was back at the Greek Theater for a summer concert.
But thinking about the
Summer of Love, and Vietnam, man, what an embarrassment of riches—all of which
spark technicolor memories. And, you know, I’m grateful for having made it
through that time, and its aftermath.
Summer of Love—gotta include
The Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”. The Airplane and Rabbit pretty much defined the San Francisco scene. (And you'll just have to go elsewhere if you want to hear "If You're Going to San Francisco". I can't even.)
You probably know
Country Joe and The Fish from their iconic performance at Woodstock. Possibly
it was the prelude to “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” that is most memorable,
but the song itself dates from 1967, so it’s legit here.
Years after both the
Summer of Love and Woodstock, I heard The Youngbloods perform this last piece
at a free concert in Griffith Park. (It, too, was written in 1967.)
That’s the one I’m
thinking about these days, when we the people are again taking to the streets
to tell the anti-democracy crowd in government that we’re not going gentle into
their black plutocratic night. Fifty years on, and we’ve got the same lessons
to teach and to learn. It’s solidarity that will prevail, and I’m grateful for
the reminder. Because, man—we're gonna need a lotta tea and music to get us through the times ahead of us.
I swear, if a body had a
mind to it, she could post every day of the year about a different war. Even
having a concentration on modern wars involving mass armies of the past couple
of hundred years gives one considerable scope.
But today is the 73rd
anniversary of the launch of Operation
Overlord, which we mostly know as the D-Day landings. To mark this
occasion, I’m sharing one of those installations that use art to examine
historical events.
In 2014 we had a
spectacular example in the “Blood
Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London: 888,246 red
ceramic poppies falling from a bastion window and filling the dry moat
completely. Each poppy represented one dead British or Commonwealth soldier
from the 1914-18 war. Individually, the poppies were poignant; in the aggregate
they were appalling.
Another example is the AIDS
Memorial Quilt, more than 48,000 3’x6’ panels, each representing someone
who died of AIDS. And the Paper Clip Project created by children at a middle
school in Whitwell, Tenn. They collected six million paper clips to try to wrap
their heads around the magnitude of the Holocaust.
In each of these cases, people
used art to connect to the otherwise difficult-to-fathom magnitude of loss.
Four years ago two
British artists created stencils of the outlines of fallen soldiers, and
invited volunteers to etch in the shapes 9000 times on the sand at Arromanches,
a flat stretch of sand close to the landing site of Gold Beach. Arromanches was
the site of one of the artificial harbors known as Mulberries, used to supply
the invaders.
This installation was
called The Fallen 9000 because the
artists put the number of dead—Allies, Germans and civilians—at 9000 for the
first day. Although it’s frankly difficult to pinpoint the actual numbers, 9000
is as good as any for the purpose of making a point. Jamie Wardley and Andy
Moss embarked on the project to mark World Peace Day in 2013. Their original
team comprised 60 volunteers, but on the day they were joined by another 500
locals. Using the stencils and rakes, they etched 9000 outlines of individual
death along the strand.
As I’ve mentioned
before, I truly love this kind of installation—not only the intersection of art
and history, but the ephemeral nature of the piece. The 560 people on that
September day had to work quickly, and within a few hours the water had washed
away all their efforts. Kind of like the
grass in Carl Sandburg’s poem.
On the day we as a nation
celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m focusing on some of
the remarkable achievements of the United States of America that have occurred
in my lifetime. Some of the ones with special meaning for me:
The Space Program. It started
out as the Space Race, us against the Soviets, and they won the first few
heats. But oh, when we put our minds—our very best minds—to it, we soared.
Viz.:
The Mercury Seven—our space
pioneers. I’ll give you John Glenn’s first trip, on 20 February 1962, since we
so recently lost him:
1969: Apollo II, first landing
on the moon. Neil Armstrong took that giant leap on 20 July, followed by Buzz
Aldrin. I watched it in Champaign, Ill., with my friend Gretchen Pullen’s family.
Look at Armstrong just hopping around like an eight-year-old:
Taking a giant step of a
different sort, Richard M. Nixon took a blowtorch to the ice block of our
relations with China, and within a few years of entering office, he was entering
the People’s Republic. Literally.
But Nixon’s hubris grew as
though on steroids, and it was the now-vilified main-stream media, including
the New York Times’s disclosure of
the Pentagon Papers and the stellar work of the Washington Post, digging into the Watergate scandal. From publisher
Katharine Graham down to newbie reporter Bob Woodward, the Post uncovered
corruption and crimes on a scale we’d thought could never be replicated. They
uncovered it, verified it in accordance with high journalistic standards, and
they published it, in the face of intimidation from high-ranking Administration
officials. Including Attorney General John Mitchell.
Yes, that’s right: our chief
legal officer was not only in on the crimes, he threatened those who brought
them to light. Plus ça change…
[From left, Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor
Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee. Photo by Washington Post]
It gave me hope that, no
matter how far off track we got, we could right our course and continue to move
forward.
We’ve had some amazing song
writers during my lifetime. I’ll just sum them up with Bob Dylan and give you
something that was true in 1964 when he wrote it and sure as hell is true again
now.
Here’s Tracy Chapman singing
it at his 30th Anniversary Concert:
In the cinematic arts we’ve
had a shedload of brilliant filmmakers. These are among my favorites: Coppola,
Coppola, Spielberg, Hill, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Howard, Lee.
And we made—for a while—astonishing
progress toward equality for all in this shining city upon a hill: striking
down the policies of separate-but-equal; don’t ask, don’t tell; and governmental
intrusion into the reproductive rights of women.
All of this may have
culminated in the election, in 2008, and reelection, in 2012, of the first
African-American man to the Presidency.
It’s Martin Luther King Day,
of the week that will see the installation of the antithesis of all these
achievements—the Kleptocrat and his appointed administration, abetted by Repugnant
majorities in both Houses of Congress. So I’m holding on to these things that I
witnessed in my lifetime. We were good, once. I hope we can return to goodness
once again.
I spent this morning at Arlington National Cemetery. I
thought Memorial Day might be a good time to check in; I last
visited on Easter.
I’ve never actually been here for Memorial Day; it was
quite surprising, and rather an emotional overload.
I’ve seen the graves decorated with wreaths for the
holidays, but there is something about looking across row upon endless row of small
American flags next to the headstones that just grips my throat.
Any way you look at it—across or through—not one person was
left behind. All were remembered.
Same thing with flowers. As you walked into the visitor
center there were young folks offering you flowers—roses, chrysanthemums, lilies—to
lay on a grave. And yet—every grave I passed already had at least one flower on
it.
Not even those without headstones were neglected: every
grave I saw with a temporary marker also had a flag and a flower.
ANC was also a place for gatherings today. Folks brought
out their camp chairs and umbrellas, spread blankets and settled in to spend
some quality time with a friend or family member.
Many a headstone was decorated with an (empty) beer can or
mini-bottle of scotch or bourbon. And there were items that are often found at
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, too.
You know what—this is all I can manage after walking
through these acres of sacrifice. But I’m deeply grateful for the men and women
who have traded their lives for ours, and who rest in places like ANC around
the world. And I’m also grateful for the people who honor them today and
every day.
