So It Goes

Havel and Kim: Living Within the Truth and the Lie

IT'S MORE than a little ironic that the death of Vaclav Havel, who played a major role in disintegrating a totalitarian regime, coincided roughly with the announcement of the death of Kim Jong Il, who committed himself to sustaining such a regime. They were two sides of a similar coin. Without men like Kim, Havel would have had no reason to risk his life to bring about generational change; without men like Havel, Kim would have no concrete excuse (though he probably had many imagined ones) to so ruthlesslessly enforce the kind of perverse system injustice and inhumanity that defines his nation.

Even now that Kim has died, it is clear that North Korea will likely continue "living within the lie", as Havel would describe such a society, that he and his father Kim Il Sun sustained for so long.

This extraordinary video footage offers a spectacular example of just how bizarre the North Korean lie was and apparently remains. It shows masses of North Koreans weeping hysterically in public over the last few days in the wake of the "Dear Leader's" passing. At times, the din of the crying seems almost deafening and the histrionics extreme.

There could be many social and psychological reasons for this outpouring, some have suggested. But there's quite possibly something else going on there, according to at least one former party ideology boss (quoted here) who defected to South Korea in 1997 and said that after Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 “anything other than mourning was not allowed.”

“The party conducted surveys to see who displayed the most grief, and made this an important criterion in assessing party members’ loyalty. Patients who remained in hospitals and people who drank and made merry even after hearing news of their leader’s death were all singled out for punishment.” Even those who remained merely dry-eyed, he said, were harshly reprimanded and penalized. In other words, for many the grief is just a government-engineered show from which the people are not free to desist.

The scene of the North Korean mourners instantly reminds me of an unforgettable vignette Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes in "The Gulag Archipelago". In the late-1930s in Moscow Province, Solzhenitsyn documented, a district Pary conference took place:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up.... The small hall echoed with "stormy applause, rising to an ovation." For three, minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the "stormy applause rising to an ovation" continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting with exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would be the first to stop?

The applause continued for nine, ten minutes, but no one could figure out just how they could possibly end the agony, even though they were all surely conscious of the insanity of it all. It's hypothetically possible they would have gone on clapping for much longer had it not been for a certain director of a paper factory, who, after a full 11 minutes of the nonsense, "assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat."

And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That was, however, how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different.

This is what Havel called "living within the lie," enabling a great charade to govern all of life. As he wrote in 1978, the totalitarian system is:

...thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial intluence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."

Havel added that "when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game, everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably."

This breaking of the rules (or jumping off the revolving wheel, as Solzhenitsyn might put it) is what Havel called "living within the truth" -- difficult and dangerous business, as the examples from North Korea and the Soviet Union illustrate. It can take generations, if ever, before "living within the truth" cracks the granite infrastructure of a totalitarian regime. People like Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the many other dissidents across the globe and history have put up with unthinkable physical pain, psychological and economic depredation and, worst of all, the demoralization at times that their sacrifices may be all for naught.

Havel's legacy takes us back to a time that seems so distant now it's hard to believe a society so absurd, dehumanizing and utlimately self-destructive could ever have existed. Kim's present-day North Korea is, of course, the smelling salt that wakes us from such disbelief. It reminds me also of how extraordinary those people are who "live within the truth" and how mere mortals like me are not fit for such a noble and difficult existence.

Jeff

Celebrating Re-creation on July 4

I'M IN THE MIDDLE of a terrific new Civil War history: 1861 by Adam Goodheart. As the title suggests, it's about the events and states of mind that led up to outbreak of the war between the states. The book shines a light on a much different episode in American history than the one we celebrate today, July 4. But, like the July 4 holiday, it reminds us that one of the constant features of our nation's history is re-creation (not recreation, which is what we usually we do to observe these important historical mileposts).

In the months leading up to the Civil War, the people of the United States found that they could no longer live with the great compromises they had negotiated among themselves for decades. Though no one knew in late 1860 and early 1861 precisely how President-elect Abraham Lincoln would address the twin problem of slavery and potential disunion (according to the custom of the time, he made hardly any public appearances or utterances during his election campaign and before he took office), his earlier pronouncements and his party's platform strongly suggested an abandonment of the long-held status quo.

To the chagrin of the hardcore abolitionists, it was not quite full emancipation of slaves. But, on the other hand, Southerners feared Lincoln would end the institution of slavery, on which they (and really the entire country, North and South) relied. One by one, even before Lincoln took office and before the first shots at Fort Sumter, Southern members of Congress resigned their seats and headed back home to create a new and separate nation. In spite of last-ditch efforts by some to stave off this split by offering Southern states even more appeasements, the slide to secession -- and war -- seemed (at least in retrospect) inexorable. How frightening that must of have been for everyone, even those who were believed firmly in the righteousness of their cause.

If ever there were ripe moments for the U.S. to re-create itself, this was one of them -- though perhaps more abruptly and cataclysmically than any other since the Revolution. To draw on one of the overused images of our current age, neither Southerners nor Northerners wanted to kick the can of indecision further down the road as they had for decades. This was the end of the line, a calling of the question of whether this country could continue to look away from the stark inconsistency between the values it set on July 4, 1776 (and later in 1787 with the Constitution) and the practice of slavery. And it was apparently time to settle whether or not this was indeed one cohesive nation or a collection of many states, each with its own right to accept or ignore the fundamental principles of the federal government.

In 1776, the founders of the nation also engaged in a far-reaching act of re-creation. As in 1861, the status quo of colonization by Great Britain became untenable, and acknowledgment of that fact (The Declaration of Independence) was just the first act of bravery. The next -- defending that acknowlegment and even dying for it -- took even more courage. That's ostensibly what we celebrate today July 4.

But July 4 is also about the act of re-creation. America seems always to be in a constant state of re-creation, not necessarily on the scale we saw in the 1860s or during any of the other major historical turning points, but in small, simple, imperceptible ways. Perhaps like few places anywhere, America's social and political systems were built not only to withstand re-creation but to encourage it -- civilly and constructively. One of the core assumptions of our system is that the enterprise of nation building is never perfect or complete and that we must be able to improve it constantly.

That, to me, is one of the aspects of American Exceptionalism (not, as some voices today have implied, that we are always better and stronger than every other nation and that anyone who says otherwise is a traitor). It is, to me, one of the other reasons to celebrate on July 4. 

To be sure, there have been other acts of social and political re-creation in American history that resulted in powerful upheavals -- the civil rights movement, the Great Depression and the rise of organized labor are notable among them. And there's no question that many of our major military engagements, particularly the great World Wars, transformed us socially and politically, not only here in the U.S. but on the global stage. But I think one can argue that none were nearly as traumatic and sweeping as the Revolution and the Civil War and that, before and after each, the U.S. was a completely different nation.

Thankfully, the simple, less noticeable acts of re-creation in America come and go without the crashes of lightning Americans endured when they spawned the new republic in the late 18th century and then fought fiercely to keep it intact in the mid-19th. As vituperative, grotesque and seemingly insoluable as our present-day political and social disputes can be, I truly can't imagine them reaching the sort of breaking point they did in 1861 when the only real option was all-out war. Maybe because we as a nation understand, even today, how truly painful that conflict was, I have strong faith in our ability as a nation, which revers the rule of law, to work out our differences civilly and peacefully (even if that means adopting some screwy options, which are not in short supply these days).

Happy Independence and Re-Creation Day.

Jeff

The Downhill Decade

THIS WAS THE DECADE THAT WASN'T WHAT WE'D HOPED. That's what a new public opinion survey from the Pew Research Center seems to have found.

Fifty percent of the 1,500 Americans polled in this study said that their overall assessment of the last 10 years was generally negative, and only 27 percent said it was positive. That stands it pretty stark contrast to the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90, which these respondents gave positive marks of as low as 34 percent ('60s) and 57 percent ('90s). Maybe that's a reflection of how the pain of tough times softens as the years go on; the 2000s are still too fresh in our minds. Or maybe it's a sign that the 2000s were extraordinarily tumultuous.

It's hard to imagine any stretch of time -- a day or a decade -- that does not contain within it some disaster and heartache somewhere in the world. But, come to think of it -- and for some reason I hadn't been thinking in 10-year chunks until now -- we've had a pretty rough ten years.

There were the 9/11 attacks; war with two nations and a global terrorist network; bad news about an impending global meltdown; an epic hurricane that destroyed a major city and much of the region around it; and a financial crisis of a scale we have not seen for 80 years. And that's just all the misery and destruction Americans are conscious of. There were many other tragedies (genocide in Sudan, a major earthquake in China, to name a couple), too, that qualify this as the "downhill" decade -- to use the word respondents most often cited as the right adjective for the 2000s. But, of course, that's not what we Americans think of first.

Reality TV shows took the biggest beating as, by far, the least popular social or technological change that occurred over the last decade; 63 percent saw the shows as a "change for the worse." Why then are these among the most popular shows on television? A distant second, but still significant "change for the worse" was "more people getting tattoos" at 40 percent unlikability. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who can't wait for either these trends to become a distant memory. (Apologies to all of you with tattoos, but I just don't get it).

The technological revolution -- the proliferation of cell phones, e-mail, the internet, and Blackberries and iPhones, for example, came in high on the list of change for the better (though there are apparently mixed feelings about social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and blogs, but we can figure that one out later).

A great sign: increasing racial and ethnic diversity is viewed by 61 percent of Americans as change for the better, and that's especially true for younger Americans, who, in my personal experience, just take diversity as a given, not as an extraordinary phenomenon (which might be good or bad, I don't know). A sign that we still have a way to go: only 38 percent overall said that the increasing acceptance of gays and lesbians has been a change for the better of the last decade.That's the next social frontier, and I hope we get there sooner than later.

Amid all the expressions of disappointment and sorrow about the last ten years, I'd like to take heart in this: 59 percent think the next decade will be better than the one we're leaving. What's that mean, though? Are they just saying that they it can't possibly get worse than what we've been through? Or is this just wishful thinking?

Whichever, it's good to know that there's some optimism for the future. We're going to need that if we are to put this last decade behind us.

Jeff

Kristallnacht: The Other Anniversary

HOW INTERESTING THAT TODAY, NOVEMBER 9, is the anniversary of one of the most exhilarating moments of happiness in 20th century history and one of the most terrifying: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Kristallnacht in 1938. One is a celebration of liberation, the other a solemn remembrance of how a people became enemies of their own country overnight.

I don't mean to dim the bright light of elation we should all feel about the fall of the Berlin Wall, to make any comparisons or to suggest that one was linked to the other -- though for those in the East the dark cloud of dehumanization that appeared in 1930s Germany and Austria hovered for another 50 years.

For some reason, it just seemed appropriate to think for at least a few minutes about what was a pivotal moment in the war against the Jews in Europe. For Jews in Germany and Austria who had hoped the ominous depredations imposed on them by the Nazis would either level off or go away, Kristallnacht was a clear message that they were in serious danger. It shook and frightened them, hastening their efforts to find refuge elsewhere. Some got out, many didn't because many governments around the world, including the U.S., were unwilling to be burdened by them.

For those not familiar, Kristallnacht was a Nazi government-inspired pogrom against German and Austrian Jews. The pretext for the pogrom was a Jew's assassination of a government official in the Germany Embassy in Paris. That incident set off a flurry of violent attacks on Jews and their personal and communal property.

In his 1985 historical book "The Holocaust," Sir Martin Gilbert described the toll:

"Bonfires were lit in every neighbourhood where Jews lived. On them were thrown prayer books, Torah scrolls, and countless volumnes of philosophy, history and poetry. In thousands of streets, Jews were chased, reviled and beaten up.

"In twenty-four hours of street violence, ninety-one Jews were killed. More than thirty thousand -- and one in ten of those who remained -- were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Before most of them were released two to three months later, as many as a thousand had been murdered, 244 of them in Buchenwald. A further eight thousand Jews were evicted from Berlin: children from orphanages, patients from hospitals, old people from old peoples' homes. There were many suicides....

"During the night, as well as breaking into tens of thousands of shops and homes, the Stormtroops set fire to one hundred and ninety-one synagogues.... The destruction of the synagogues led the Nazis to call that night Kristallnacht, or 'night of the broken glass'; words chosen deliberately to mock and belittle."

For a more personal reflection from a surviver of that terrifying time and for some images of the destruction, click here.

As I sit here in the quiet of my house in a country where I move freely and fearlessly, it's hard to imagine what it must be like to witness this sudden and furious spasm of violence aimed at everything that sustains me -- to have, as the survivor in the video relates, neighbors break down my door and run through the house destroying everything in sight. And, knowing now what would happen over the next several years, it is terrifying to think how quickly the tide can turn. And, finally, it is unfathomable to understand how desperate it must have felt to be trapped inside this hostile land with few options to leave.

It is almost like being buried alive. Indeed, that's exactly what it was.

Jeff

Photo above: A synagogue burns in Siegen, Germany, on November, 10 1938. [Photo Credit: The Pictorial History of the Holocaust, ed. Yitzhak Arad. New York: Macmillan, 1990.]

Coney Island With My Own Eyes

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I have heard from my father about Coney Island, Brooklyn, his birthplace and childhood home, but I had never been there. So, of course, it took on this rather mythic quality in my mind. That's because it was a myth to me, a sort of sacred but unverifiable narrative that explains my father, to some extent.

Seeing it with my own eyes, as I did with my father on July 5, 2006, was a bit of a let down. Not that I was expecting the Garden of Eden. I knew that, even before Coney Island fell on hard times, it did not fall far. It was almost always a place of poverty, whether the people realized it or not (as the late humorist Sam Levinson once said, even though he grew up dirt poor, he never knew it until he got older because everyone around him was too.) I didn't think it would be more glamourous than it was because the closest Coney Island ever came to glamour, from what I can tell, was bright amusement lights, freak shows and Vaudevillian acts of its earlier days.

It's just when you see something that you have conjured in your mind for some time, it's never exactly what you imagined -- for the same reason that people are often let down by movie versions of books they've read, even if, on their own terms, the movies are pretty good.

Mermaid Avenue is the spine of the neighborhood where my dad lived. It runs generally north and south, just about parallel to and about two or three blocks from where all amusement park attractions ran along the boardwalk and the ocean. As he and I walked the neighborhood, I realized that nearly all his world ran for about two to four blocks on either side of Mermaid between West 14th Street or Stillwell Avenue (where the elevated train still spills people onto the approach to the boardwalk, right where Nathan's made a fortune selling hot dogs for five cents, half what his former employer charged) to maybe West 37th Street at the farthest. In other words, that's about 23 blocks by about maybe eight blocks.

Everything they needed -- or at least could afford -- was there. There was the obligatory drug store on the corner of my dad's street at West 23rd and Mermaid, where the pharmacist was more of a primary physician than the primary physicans, diagnosing and treating minor ailments, and where my dad and his friends would hover in hopes of getting tapped to tell someone in an apartment nearby that there was a phone call for them at the drug store. For that he could count on a five cent tip. (Everything, ite seemed, was a nickel: a hot dog, admission to a movie, a tip for helping someone with groceries.)

The drug store is gone now, as are most of the physical, let alone communal, remnants of the neighborhood of his time, which was mostly during the Depression years. A couple of blocks away was his elementary school. Judging from the vintage and the wear of the houses that are now standing on the site of that building, it looks like it was torn down (probably under the policy of "urban renewal") close to 50 years ago. Another block or two from there, on a corner on Mermaid Avenue, is the site of his former synagogue. It is now a police station that looks like it could have been built in the 1980s, suggesting that the synagogue building (if not its use as a synagogue) may have held on for a while.

Strangely, if maybe providentially, at least one momument to his youth remained. As we turned the corner from Mermaid onto West 23rd Street, we were on the lookout for the site of the one apartment (of the three or four) in which he and his family spent their most time while in Coney Island. "What was the address of the building?" Without any hesitation, he answered, "2875." We walked another 25 yards and found that the only surviving three-flat apartment building on that side of the street was -- 2875 W. 23rd St.

We were really kind of flabbergasted. Because so much of what he remembered was no longer there,  and seeing as how this was the only remaining building of the era on that street (albeit, it looked pretty "rustic"), it almost seemed cosmic that it would still be there. If there were some reason for that being something more than a coincidence, then why? Is my dad somehow a chosen person and was that a sign from God? If so, what should he do about that? Wrestle with an angel, lead enslaved people from bondage, or take his only son (that would be me) to the top of a mountain, bind and slash him and then offer him up in sacrifice to God? It didn't come to that (thank goodness), but I have to say it was almost that kind of a moment.

This was the first time my father had been back to this neighborhood in exactly 60 years to the month. That's when he returned from the Army and told his mother (who had been a widow since her husband, my grandfather, died while she was pregnant with my father), that he didn't want to stay in New York. It was too busy and chaotic for him. He wanted to give Indiana a try. He had lived his high school years in Indianapolis when the whole family followed his brother-in-law during the war to work in an airplane engine factory. He has been in Indiana ever since, and the only vestige of his being a Brooklynite is his tendency to say "bidness," instead of "business" (biz-niss).

We were there a day after the great annual hot dog-eating contest at Nathan's, an event that attracted tens of thousands of fans and serious ESPN play-by-play coverage (aired opposite the World Cup final game, alas). In the wake of the crowd, the place was still a mess. Also, it was raining off and on that day, and the light was a little gloomy.

It was hard not to feel that way, too. That's not to say that everything must stay in a perpetual and pristine condition, waiting for everyone who ever lived there to make a sudden pilgramage. But it is still a living community. Indeed, there is a new minor league baseball park, which I'm told is packed every game, and there has been a true revitalization of the amusement parks there and the boardwalk. The crime and violence of only a decade or so ago are apparently rare now. And you can still get a good hot dog.

What's more, there are many families in Coney Island now, from many parts of the world, especially Russia, who are reliving the life my father and his family lived. The place looks different now, but not that different.

Jeff

July 1864 and Today

A STONE OBELISK erected to the memory of 17 unknown fallen Confederate soldiers stands in a small church graveyard about a half mile from my house. Planted in the ground beneath it is a small Confederate flag.

It’s an odd sight for someone like me, who grew up in a northern state, where there are no such firsthand reminders of the Civil War. I still find it fascinating to see the actual ground where all this terrible history occurred and even more amazing that it is only a short distance from my own home.

And it’s a bit stranger to see a Confederate flag rippling in the breeze beside the obelisk – a fairly new flag, obviously planted by someone recently, perhaps for this Memorial Day – in Maryland, only a mile or so north of the District of Columbia border.

Marylanders were ambivalent about the Civil War. Confederate and Union sympathizers alike lived here. But it was technically a Union state. And given its current cultural and ideological landscape, I’m surprised that the presence of a Confederate flag in Maryland soil (highly visible from the very edge of a busy arterial street, no less) hasn’t stirred up some opposition. Even in southern states, where the site of Confederate flags is much more common, some great public debates have accompanied their presence in recent years.

Because it is Memorial Day weekend, I decided that I would devote some of my time yesterday to thinking about what the holiday stands for. So I got on my bike and made a few stops: one at the small cemetery near my house, another at the site of Ft. Stevens, about three miles away, and another at the small National Cemetery that bears the remains of some 40 Union soldiers who fought at Ft.Stevens in defense of the national capital. Along the way, I passed the gates of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as I do many times a week, and where the casualties of today’s great conflict go to repair the battered bodies.

In July 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early led his 15,000 troops up the Shenandoah Valley north to Hagerstown, Md., and then east to Washington through Fredrick. Early’s forces met with little or no resistance as they made their way to the capital. Their objective was to distract the Union from its growing military pressure on Richmond by applying pressure of its own on Washington, D.C.

Ft. Stevens, which stood near the northern point of Washington, D.C. was “defended by a meager force of convalescents, quartermaster employees and 100 day militia volunteers,” according to a historic market on its present-day site. Apparently, even after several years of bloody humiliations by the Confederate, the Union still found it difficult to believe its capital was at all vulnerable, surely not from the north.

On July 11, Early’s soldiers came within 150 yards of Ft. Stevens (after sacking and burning the houses of Francis Preston Blair, Sr., a prominent counselor to President Abraham Lincoln, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Md.) and attacked. The “meager” Union force repelled the attack before receiving reinforcements on July 12.

In addition to this being the closest the capital city came to capture by the Confederacy, it was notably the closest Lincoln ever came to being shot by in the line of fire. As David Herbert Donald described in his Lincoln biography, “Lincoln was in the fort when it was first attacked. Having driven out from Washington in his carriage, he mounted to the front parapet. He borrowed a field glass from the signal officer Asa Townshend Abbott and looked out over the field where the Confederates were advancing. ‘He stood there with a long frock coat and plug hat on, making a very conspicuous figure,’ Abbott recalled. When the Confederates came within shooting distance, an officer twice cautioned Lincoln to get down, but he paid no attention. Then a man standing near him was shot in the leg, and a soldier roughly order the President to get down or he would have his head knocked off. He coolly descended, got into his carriage, and was driven back to the city….”

The President returned to the fort with his wife the next day. Again, he mounted the parapet. “After a surgeon standing near him was shot, [General Horatio G.] Wright ordered the parapet cleared and asked the President to step down. Lincoln insisted on remaining until the general said he would have him forcibly removed.”

(I don't know if you can see it well in the photo above, but the vertical-ish stone at the left edge of the image is supposedly where Lincoln stood on the parapet. Click the photo and you can see a larger version of it.)

On one level, it seems somewhat admirable that the Commander-in-Chief would allow himself even a brief sampling of the horrible events over which he presided, if only to give him a regular reminder of the consequences his decisions might cause. (I don’t know whether Winston Churchill came as close to the heat of battles during World War II. But it’s remarkable that, after being humiliated and demoted from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty following the devastating failure of the 1915 Dardanelles campaign, which conceived and promoted, Churchill suited up as a Colonel and went to the trenches of France and Belgium, where he led a battalion soldiers in battle. Not something many high-ranking political leaders, who are responsible for putting boys into battle, have done, certainly not today.)

On another level, it’s hard to believe  Lincoln would be so reckless. He had to know that even a minor wound would be an enormous symbol of the Confederacy’s strength and surely disabling to the Union. But maybe there was something else going on with the war-weary President. As Herbert writes, only a few days before the Ft. Stevens attack, “a visitor found Lincoln deeply depressed, ‘indeed quite paralyzed and wilted down.’” Not that he had a death wish, but maybe he wasn’t quite as clear-eyed as he should have been. Who really knows?

The remains of Union soldiers killed at  Ft. Stevens in July 1864 lay in a small national battle cemetery about a quarter of a mile away. It is maybe an acre and a half of well-kept land, surrounded by an ornate iron fence and tucked between rather run-down apartment buildings and retail shops along the same well-traveled street that passes the Confederate memorial near my house. (The 17 remembered there died in the same battle of Ft. Stevens.) In it are several large monuments memorializing various regiments from different northern states. At the center of the cemetary, is a flagpole, surrounded by circle of small headstones, many with names too worn by weather to read. (The design of the cemetery reminds one of the much larger and more famous cemetery at Gettysburg, which, if you read Garry Wills’ excellent book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, is no accident. It reflects a revolution of cemetery design at the time.)

Remembering the people whose remains lay in this place – and even in the ground under the Confederate memorial ­­– is the least we owe them and the many others Americans killed and wounded in battle. Especially on Memorial Day, when doing so is little more than an afterthought for most of us.

But it’s also good for us, the living, to remember. Lincoln famously declared in his First Inaugural Address that the “mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Memory is what binds us together as Americans, though the necessary debates about what is the true memory can divide us as well.

We also owe a lot to the men and women convalescing at Walter Reed, which sits along the busy three-mile stretch between the Union and Confederate monuments to the battle of Ft. Stevens. Our media and many other organizations do a lot to remember what they and their colleagues have done in this war. But I still feel we are too removed from them. Many of our national political leaders on the one hand apparently want to remind us of why the war in Iraq is important and justified. But on the other hand, they don’t want it to intrude too much on the daily lives of Americans, lest that depress the morale of the nation. And we don’t seem to want to be reminded. We don’t want these terrible memories to interfere with our own desire for normalcy.

Even if the lives of many soldiers and their families are far from normal. The physically and mentally ravaged put their lives back together on the bucolic Walter Reed campus. I occasionally see a few of them, with missing limbs, at a mall near our house and the hospital. Just as I can’t imagine what it must have been like to march in ranks into enemy fire during the Civil War, I can’t imagine what today’s war casualties and their families are going through. I hope their sorrows will have been worth it, though I unfortunately suspect they have not.

So let us take at least a few minutes out of the holiday celebrations to truly remember and give them thanks.

Jeff

(To see photos of Ft. Stevens and memorials to the Confederate and Union soldiers killed in battle there, go to the photo album on the righthand sidebar.)