Memorializing Decoration Day, Ctd

(via James Fallows)

Today is Memorial Day and it would be well worth your time to click through to this Google Earth overlay and take a look at the Map of the Fallen.

Butterfield's Lullaby

Via Wikipedia:

The bugle call was composed by the Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, an American Civil War general who commanded the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Division in the V Army Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Butterfield wrote the tune at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in July 1862. Taps also replaced "Tattoo", the French bugle call to signal "lights out." Butterfield's bugler, Oliver W. Norton, of Erie, Pennsylvania, was the first to sound the new call. Within months, Taps was used by both Union and Confederate forces. Villanueva (see external link "Detailed History of Taps" below) states that the tune is actually a variation of an earlier bugle call known as the Scott Tattoo which was used in the U.S. from 1835 until 1860.

Rorschach Journalism at its finest

Michael Yon's fine reporting continues with a Memorial Day message. Yon's excellent first-hand accounts of firefights can be quite compelling. The comments section of a Yon post interest me for another reason. His comment section reads like the collected responses of a large group of people participating in a Rorschach journalism quiz. Each person sees in Yon's post what they want to see. Anything outside of their own narrow world view must be immediately shot down or disavowed. Faithful commenters were outraged when Yon suggested a civil war was underway. Others balked when he suggested that the surge may in fact be working.

Whether or not Yon's analysis is accurate almost seems irrelevant to me. I read his posts eagerly to consume the vibrant flavor of his delicious and vivid reporting. It is the factual portion of his postings that are truly remarkable. He frequently captures the personal and intense nature of combat. Don't come to the table without an appetite for harrowing and heart wrenching detail. The entree Yon serves satisfies my intellectual curiosity for news about the guys on the ground.

If you want your pre-conceived notions about the Iraq War confirmed by Yon stop reading the moment you feel uncomfortable. He does not report want he thinks you want to hear. He reports what he sees. As I wrote earlier, he does interject commentary, but if you read him long enough he is not coming from a particular partisan point of view. His point of view is that of a professional soldier. (Yon served in Army Special Forces.) 1. What is the mission? 2. How are we doing? He is very tough on the military brass and has frequently criticized their shortcomings. For the most part I have read little criticism of the mainstream media and political leaders by Yon.

Silence and Memories

I have only the memories of my fallen comrades. While the lines deepen in my aging face, my buddies who did not come home are still fresh faced and smooth skinned. Forever young. Memorial Day requires that the many remember the sacrifices of the few. Andrew J. Bacevich remembers his son this Memorial Day. A grieving father reminds us of the price of war.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

Please read the entire column. Lincoln's words at a little town in Pennsylvania seem appropriate here.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.