May 29, 2006
Pathos
For a moment the other day, when the president finally got around to remembering and admitting something other than the customary and innocuous “mistakes were made,” he limited his rare gaffe only to smart talk rather than dumb deeds. But even so, he said, his remarks were surely “misinterpreted,” thus taking the edge off his mea culpa by passing off at least a piece of the buck to somebody else.
For the life of me, I cannot come up with anyway to interpret “Bring ‘em on” and “Wanted dead or alive” in some other way. I spent too much time at the Saturday morning movies growing up in west Texas not to savvy that kind of talk. Maybe there’s some shade between cocky and arrogant that might allow for a bit of nuance, but then nuance is not exactly the sort of sophistication one goes looking for in the oval office.
Yes, Abu Ghraib was mentioned and maybe shows up over in the dumb-deeds column of Bush’s admission, but even so, as he said, others did it. “The people who committed those acts were brought to justice,” he said. “They’ve been given a fair trial and tried and convicted.” None of the usual and prideful commander-in-chief talk on this watch.
Along these same lines, our annual keeping of Memorial Day always seems to me more passive than active. Everything from the music to the monuments reenacts the past to the point of making me wonder whether or not we’ll ever begin to learn from the experience of that past and all the millions who died to teach us that war is always a mistake. Intentional, regime-changing war is even more so.
I’m saddened for myself and for my colleagues in the Great Middle War (aka WW II) that the keeping of Memorial Day so often borders on glorifying that stuff rather than learning from it. That failure, that sign of our national pathology is eating us alive.