Honoring Heros the Wrong Way

THE MOST AMAZING THING about the World War Two memorial in Washington D.C. is that it took so long to erect it. Of course, the Washington monument was still under construction during the Civil War, the Lincoln Memorial was finished just before World War One, and the Jefferson Memorial was built in the nineteen thirties. We may be a bit slow, but we always catch up. Now, of course, many of the national memorials, monuments, sites, and parks are closed down. The Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson memorials can seemingly fend for themselves; who needs a tour guide anyway? Was it really necessary to barricade the World War Two memorial? Couldn't people walk around it and enjoy it without any help? Perhaps a paid government official needs to be on hand constantly, to guard against vandalism. On Sunday morning, October 13, 2013, the barricades came down, as a lawless mob of conservative tea party types, including the infamous senator Ted Cruz and the former governor of her abandoned state of Alaska, Sarah Palin, participated in the destruction of public property and tresspassed on the closed grounds of the WWII momument. Sure, the site should not have been closed down, it was, and the law is, as they say, the law. People like that should be locked up. Said Palin, with her usual penetrating intelligence: war monuments and veterans are above politics. Wrong as usual, ma'am. Wars, and those who participate in them, and the monuments we erect to them, are below, not above politics. They are the tangible proof that when diplomacy, a vital part of politics, fails us, we resort to organized violence. Monuments to war are monuments to the stupidity, the failure of human civilization.Ironically, the real heros, the veterans themselves, are not happy with the tea party folks for co-opting what they intended to be a non political day of protest against the shutting down of war memorials.They agree with the conservatives that honoring the fallen heros should be above politics, but they feel, understandably, that the tea party did exactly the opposite, in bringing the protest down to a political level. Better perhaps that we should erect momuments to poets, artists, and scientists, to celebrate human success. But of course, those who do not beat into their brains the mistakes of the past are much more likely to repeat them, to paraphrase Santayana. You can understand why a bunch of good patriotic conservatives woule objed to a war memorial being needlessly closed. But if we are to make ourselves believe that those who have died in our wars did so fighting for decency, for civilization, for what is right, then we surely do not honor their memory by engaging in lawless violence while deceiving ourselves that we are honoring them.