I think President Ford, who died in 2006, would have been surprised at how little the centennial of the end of World War I was marked in America last year.
It's funny how our national-history-related holidays have worked out (I know in a way all our observed holidays are national-history-related, but you know what I mean). When I was kid the old-timers still remembered VE Day (May 8) and VJ Day (August 15), commemorating the victories of World War II in Europe and Japan respectively. They were marked as national days of note, but were never national holidays. Had the whole of World War II ended with a single enemy surrender, the way World War I closed with the armistice on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we might have gotten another national holiday out of the end of WW II. But World War II was kind of two different tremendous wars that happened to be going on at the same time, with lots of little side wars, and the Japanese were not cooperative enough to give up the game when the Nazis capitulated. It's funny that we remember Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, and D-Day, June 6, more clearly than VE or VJ Days.
Memorial Day was another one that was known to the elderly by a different name, that being Decoration Day. (Was I living in some weird time warp?) Decoration Day began as sort of a commemoration of the Civil War, but sort of not; the history of the holiday is a mess, with claims of origination in at least 25 locales. But it doesn't seem to have coincided anywhere with the date of the South's surrender in the war, which is April 9.
Only one major holiday marks the beginning rather than the end of a war -- our national Independence Day, the Fourth of July. Which is kind of weird when you think about it. It's kind of like NASCAR having its biggest event at the start of the season. In 1776 it looked pretty unlikely that the thirteen colonies under the British crown could pull this crazy stunt off, and it took until October 19, 1781, to do it. But we don't celebrate October 19 as Independence Day, when we actually got a surrender, or September 3, when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, or May 12, when the treaty took effect the following year. Maybe marking the date of the beginning of official hostilities says something about American character -- belligerence? Optimism?
Or maybe none of this matters much anymore. So many of the younger generations really don't seem to give a damn about American history, as the gatekeepers at colleges and formerly great newspapers treat it like an endless parade of slavery, bigotry, violence, blundering, and greed. The major text used in institutions of so-called higher learning is a debunked fabrication, but it serves its purpose, Forces in our country have wanted for a hundred years or more to declare Year Zero and start everything anew. Which is awfully sad, because such thinking always ends in agony.
I pray, as I often do, that our country be more worthy of the sacrifices made by the men and women whose lives were and still are spent and lost in its defense.
1 comment:
When I was born in 1953, the population was 160 million. It is now double that. I think there has been so much immigration in the last 50 years that there are lots of people whose roots here are so shallow that they have no vested interest in what happened before they got here.
And you're right, our so-called education system is little more than a propaganda mill. Critical thinking is not only discouraged, but punished if it falls outside The Narrative.
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