Memorial Day 2020

Today is Memorial Day, when we remember those whose lives have been taken in the service of the armed forces. Why do we do it? Why do we feel compelled to kill each other over land and resources? Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine and other keen intellects all found justifications for it, moral underpinnings of what what appear to be an immoral action. Ambrose Bierce said that war is God's way of teaching Americans geography. Wars have been short (Britain and Zanzibar tussled for 38 minutes in 1896) and others have lasted generations like the Hundred Year War, which dragged on for 116 years. The longest war we've fought was with the Apache nation, which stretched from 1840 to 1886, during which time we also fought the Mexicans and ourselves. All of them have lasting effects. The year after the Civil War, when the nation was starting a campaign to set aside a day in May to remember the fallen, a fifth of Mississippi's state budget was spent on artificial limbs. That state, along with Alabama, still officially recognize a Confederate Memorial Day each April. The Civil War wiped out 2% of the population and also produced Major General John A. Logan, who fought at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg, and issued an order after the fighting "for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion," which became Decoration Day and eventually Memorial Day. 

We are lucky to live in a country where civil-military relations are good. In fact, for many Americans, holidays like today are one of the rare times they even think about military, which is the sign of a healthy populace. It's hard to ignore the military when there are tanks rumbling down every public boulevard and uniformed guys with guns are on every street corner. I was in Baltimore during that city's state of emergency in 2015 when there were armored trucks and armed personnel on the streets. It was eerie. In Khartoum, La Paz and Kuala Lumpur, it's not unusual. We should all be grateful for that. We live in a society where the military obeys civilians and civilians respect the military, it has been that way since George Washington resigned his commission to become president, one of any number of brilliant norms Washington established that stabilized and served the young nation well. 

26 of the 44 men to be president have served in the military, the last being George W. Bush, who was a Texas Air National Guardsman. Military experience was practically a requirement in the second half of the 20th century where every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush, a span that lasted 48 years and nine presidents, were veterans. The longest such chain lasted from William Henry Harrison in 1841 through Chester A. Arthur in 1885 until Grover Cleveland broke up the streak of 13 veteran presidents. It says something about the number of terms (and the life expectancy) of 19th century presidents that those two streaks lasted roughly the same amount of time but earlier one includes four more men. Speaking of Grover Cleveland and the number of presidents, some of you may have read the first sentence of this paragraph and found me in error. "Nick," you may be saying. "There have been 45 presidents, not 44." While it's true there have been 45 presidential administrations, there have only been 44 men to hold the office (count them if you don't believe me) because Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms. 

A president having military experience may seem nice to have but doesn't mean that the commander-in-chief has the same capabilities as the joint chiefs of staff. Policy and military experts are there to advise the president who, as George W. Bush once memorably said, is the decider. There's no way a single person could have the intimate knowledge of the myriad domestic and foreign policy issues a president must control to be effective, making experts invaluable as extensions of the president's brain, what the current president calls his "you know what" while vaguely gesturing towards his head. The president has frictionless authority to launch America's 6000 nuclear warheads and between 1960 and 1977 the code to do so was 00000000. Before you judge our code makers too harshly, keep in mind that the nuclear codes should be a number easy to remember in time of stress (which those circumstances would certainly be) and that having the nuclear codes is really unimportant in comparison to being able to deliver them. You should feel free to judge Jimmy Carter, a veteran of the Navy, who forced the code to be changed when sent one of his jackets to the dry-cleaner's with the code still in his pocket. 

James A. Garfield, 20th president of the United States and a veteran of the Civil War, dedicated a speech to Memorial Day in 1868 when he was a congressman. Spoken like a true politician, he opened his oration by saying "I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion" and then went on for two hours. He gave the speech at Arlington cemetery in Virginia, a location that was seized during the Civil War by the Union Army from Robert E. Lee, whose wife owned it. The government felt it was fitting to honor the souls of those who lost their lives on the land once owned by the man who took too many of them. "If silence is ever golden," Garfield continued, "it must be beside the graves of fifteen-thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem the music of which can never be sung." It pains us all that that terrible poem continues to be written every day.  

So remember the lost ones, honor their memory and thank the ones who survived. The sacrifices are incalculable. Walter Benjamin wrote that “There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism,” an observation underlined by the fact that mustard gas, developed during World War I, led to the discovery of chemotherapy. I hope we can all agree, on this day especially, that war is a cancer that deserves to be radiated out of our lives.