Memorials and Democracy

Memorial Day seems to have turned into the kind of sickening mix of emotional pabulum and commercialism that has infected the entire spectrum of American holidays. And this tendency colludes with the divisive red-blue rhetoric to enhance the polarization of opinion on the ongoing war effort.

Here's what I mean.

Nowhere do we see the troops and the fallen being honored for their role as part of the system of American democracy. Nowhere do authors write that what they died for was the ideal of democratic, civilian and political control of the military. Rarely do authors state first and foremost that it is precisely the political indecision of Washington over unpopular and arguably unjust wars that is the first value for which they fight.

The worst system of governance...except for all the others, indeed.

Instead, we get a kind of deadening of the central questions of why public service matters by a continuous stream of emotionally leaden appeals to support the troops. At least they could put Samuel Barber's Adagio in the background now and again to really get the tears rolling. The individual sacrifice stories are important, don't get me wrong, but they need to be tempered by more than an occasional drumbeat that the role of military might is to protect us and our way of life, especially when there are so few clear examples of whether that role could be said to have fulfilled the claim.

The US military is a projection of democratic will, imperfect and occasionally driven more by triumphalist idealizations than clarity of forethought. And it is that political element of civics machinery that needs to be remembered around those graves on days like this. Otherwise, we are just praising a military ethos that is only important because it is ours. I prefer to find deeper moral justification for their sacrifice and loss.