!!!Relocating!!!

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Veterans Day 2011

11 – 11 – 11

Veterans Day, a k a Armistice Day: I awake at 1:30 in the morning under a waning full moon. I can’t get back to sleep, and I’m not sure why.

I’ve been reading a biography of Juliette Lowe, and I’ve just gotten to the part where she’s in England when Germany declares war and “the war to end all wars” begins.  World War I, the “Great War.”

That was in the summer of 1914, after the Archduke of Austria was assassinated. Austro-Hungarian forces invaded Serbia, Germany invaded France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The “great powers” of the time had colonies and alliances all over the world and soon the conflict was really global.

As I lie awake, I think of our grandfather Charlie, whom the outside world knew, by the end of his life, as Maj. Gen. Charles E. Kilbourne – holder of the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Croix de Guerre and Legion d’Honneur, all except the Medal of Honor garnered in the fields of France and Germany, where he led brigades of infantry and heavy artillery during 1918, losing an eye and storming a German machine gun nest in the middle of the night.

Nineteen eighteen. It is now, was in the dark hours of this morning, exactly 93 years since the guns fell silent across the war-ravaged heart of Europe. In its current museum exhibit, the Marshall Foundation in Lexington is featuring the diaries of a Bedford soldier named H.E. Simpson, who wrote of how they lay in the rat-infested trenches listening to the screams of dying men and mules – the mules that drew the caissons – and staggered out in disbelief on that winter morning to the Armistice.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. My grandfather said in the 1930s that no man who has experienced war would want it. He described the 30 minutes of waiting to go “over the top” to face the raking enemy artillery, and how “the underground beasts came to live with you. All night in the trenches you could hear them squeaking” – the rats that fed on bloated and frozen corpses in the smoke-filled, barbed-wire-entangled fields that Frederic Celine described as the “voyage to the bottom of the night.”

The esoteric philosophers say that the number 11 is a gate, and that multiple 11s show us the way to a new age. The Aquarian Age, some say. I lay there thinking of how this morning, under the still full moon, for the first time ever that fateful hour of that fateful day is quadrupled: 11/11/11/11, if you will. May it be a harbinger of a better world.

And I thought, finally, of all the European conflicts we have now largely forgotten. To me, our American Civil War was the precursor – in terms of weaponry – of the deadly havoc of World War I. But meanwhile, Europeans were perfecting the art on their side in the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer War. Who remembers now the “charge of the light brigade,” or that Paris fell to Germany more than once, or for that matter, in World War I, Gallipoli or who the players were in the Triple Entente or the Central Powers?

There is an infinite sadness to all of this, laced with the continuing denouement of colonialism, for which an unintended consequence is most of the wars still being fought on the planet today.

With its rapid-fire weapons, trench warfare, men on horseback and mule-drawn cannons – all overflown by fledgling aircraft – World War I is worth pausing over, to remember better. It was both a beginning and an end,  horrific, messy and all too human, a major crossroads in the annals of military strategy and personal suffering.

So on this Veterans Day let us salute all of those, whatever their allegiance, who went with courage, conviction and a belief in their cause, to die in Flanders’ fields and all over the world. May they rest in peace.  And may there truly, somehow, be Armistice.

The war to end all wars … 

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Where's Mr. Micawber when you need him?

A recent Jonathan Schell essay in The Nation, “Cruel America,” centered on the glee expressed at a Republican debate when Rick Perry bragged about his state’s record of executions.

 The article goes on to contrast the United States with other “civilized” nations regarding its record on such executions (most nations that purport to be democracies have abolished the death penalty) and imprisonment (with 2 million Americans in prison, we have the highest per capita prison population in the world – and we are dedicated to liberty and justice for all).

I thought again, as I often have recently, of Charles Dickens. I’d been thinking of how the agenda of the far right seems to include dismantling unions as well as health care – such as it is – and such safety nets as Social Security. Rick Perry’s audience that night also cheered lustily at the idea of letting a putative uninsured young man die if he were in a coma.

And perhaps that’s OK. Terry Schiavo comes to mind. But back to the unions. I know a lot of us think unions are way  over the top, and that unions in general are a bad idea, and so forth. Friends, if that’s your view, I think you might want to look again. In this country, it was unions that put an end to child labor and the seven-day work week, among other things. It was a union that gave journalists like me a living wage and health insurance and enabled me to send a child to college. Believe me, non-union newspapers did not provide any of the above.

Are those bad things, to abolish child labor and enable a working family to have health insurance and send its children to college? You tell me. As I was thinking about the unions, I thought of Dickens, and of how much of the point of his wonderful novels was to expose the social evils of his day, including child labor, abuse of women, and a total lack of any safety net for the working poor.

I wonder what he’d think today of our vastly wealthy society where the working poor can’t even find work. In his day, they’d have been sent to the “poor house” or the “work house,” where they’d have been consigned to the economic equivalent of unremitting slavery until death – or until some nice middle class Micawber showed up to bail them out.

Unfortunately, the current economic tsunami has wiped out most of the Micawbers along with the undeserving poor. Sometimes I think the destruction of the middle class was not an accident. But I digress.

In Dickens’ time, people also still gathered to cheer at public executions. I believe that, 100 years later, we thought we’d grown out of that stage. But it appears not.

In his Nation essay, Jonathan Schell dwells for a bit on the infinitely slippery slope from decency to depravity. He doesn’t call it that, depravity: He calls it cruelty. He says, and I quote: “An unjust society must reform its laws and institutions. A cruel society must reform itself.”

Schell continues, “There have been many signs recently that the United States has been traveling down a steepening path of cruelty. It’s hard to say why such a thing is occurring, but it seems to have to do with a steadily growing faith in force as a solution to almost any problem, whether at home or abroad.”

To read more of what Schell has to say about cruelty in our prisons, our economy,  our lives and our social fabric, go to www.thenation.com/article/163690/cruel-america.

 What would Charles Dickens say?

The language of 9/11

In its coverage of the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, NPR featured linguists on both Terry Gross’s FRESH AIR and TALK OF THE NATION. Linguist Gary Nunnberg  told Terry that his studies show that in fact 9/11 had very little effect on the language. In picking its top word or phrase for the decade, the American Dialect Society chose “Google” and “blog” ahead of 9/11.

This could be for a bunch of reasons. One is that, like the Vietnam War, both Iraq and Afghanistan have been controversial – witness the recent and ongoing debate on when and whether a U.S. president actually has the right to involve us in a war we haven’t formally declared.

And then there’s the fact that we blamed 9/11 on some deranged fanatics, instead of seeing it as a calculated act of provocation by revolutionaries.

But Nunn surmises that unlike World War II and Vietnam, the wars that followed 9/11 didn’t affect Americans as directly. He mentioned, for instance, how “supporting the troops” was a major preoccupation during World War II.

What he didn’t say –  and I think it deserves saying –  is that the troops who went to both World War II and Vietnam were a very different group from those who’ve gone to Iraq and Afghanistan. In WW II and ‘Nam, we had the draft. In fact, it was largely the Vietnam War that put an end to the draft.

So we have no draft, at least not a formal, military one. But in this era of globalization, the draft is economic. There are no jobs, and many – our 20-somethings – are choosing the military despite its current very evident risks. Your money, or your life? They are offering to lay their lives on the line simply in order to have the kind of job security that their parents attained in the years that followed World War II, the apotheosis of American success.

Whether you like Michael Moore or think he is a self-serving  nincompoop, his staged attempt in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE to find a single U.S. senator or representative in Congress with a child serving in Iraq or Afghanistan is a telling moment.

At the outset, young men and women volunteered for Afghanistan and Iraq for patriotic reasons, and some still do. But there was no draft. And that’s a major reason, I think, that the vocabulary of 9/11 and all that followed it has not embedded itself in our lives. We are not, as citizens of a nation, personally and daily  invested in these wars.  Or haven’t been, up until now.  Will that change as more and more formerly middle-class young people choose the military as the only job option left to them in a country that has systematically outsourced everything from manufacturing to office work, hospital records, accounting and paralegal jobs?

Meanwhile, the provocation, as Andrew Sullivan points out in a recent Newsweek essay,  thoroughly succeeded. Its aftermath, he says, has not and will not. The “terrorists” will not defeat America.

As with the outcome of the Vietnam War, I think that remains to be seen. Victory and defeat can happen on many levels. And I think that is another reason we haven’t embraced a 9/11 vocabulary: Americans don’t like to lose. And for much of these two quasi-declared wars, it has not been at all clear from one month to the next just exactly what, if anything, we are winning.

 

9/11 is the incident we would prefer to forget, if only we could.

Flags

I am staked out at Sushi Muramoto, right across the street from the administrative building where Lexington City Council tonight will vote on whether Confederate flags may be flown from city stanchions in this town that has been called the “Shrine of the South.” Right now the building’s doors are locked, and a TV camera man from Roanoke is pacing back and forth from his truck. The event starts at 8. It’s  6:46.

Both Robert E. Lee and T.J. “Stonewall” Jackson are buried here.

I grew up here. To grow up here was to grow up knowing people who were the children of men who fought in the Civil War, on the side that lost, defending their beliefs but also their homes. 

Many of my friends’ great-grandfathers fought under them, or under “Jeb” Stuart, or A.P. Hill. They fought under the flag they call the Dixie cross, that red one with the blue X and white stars.

My grandparents’ fathers fought on the other side. They were officers in the Union army. But that, and how we got here  -- and why I returned after a lifetime of work elsewhere --  is another story.

Tonight’s story is about flags. What to fly and when and where. The ordinance that’s up for a vote will forbid  flying any flag on city poles except the American, state and city flags. No longer will flags of the town's  two universities -- Washington & Lee and Virginia Military Institute -- fly, nor any others, for special occasions. The flap about the Confederate flags is the reason. 

People can still carry whatever flags they like in parades, under this ordinance. They can fly the Dixie cross on their houses, cars and trucks, wear it on their bodies, run it up on their lawns. Just not on city poles.

By 6:50, the TV crew has been joined by about a dozen people. Doors open at 7:30, with a batch of city police officers standing around and half of Main Street blocked off. A Confederate flag rally earlier in the evening drew about 300 people.

By 7:55, the council chambers are packed. The cameras are poised. In the second row sits a slender middle-aged man in wire-framed specs and a Sons of Confederate Veterans T-shirt that proclaims, “The Cause for Southern Independence, 1860-1865.” The room seats 110. Another 50 or so folks are jammed out in the hall, most of them wearing or carrying the Dixie cross.

Lexington residents speak first, by Council decree. Almost to a person – black or white, old or young, man or woman – they support the ordinance. Ban the flags. Many note that their great-granddads fought and some died for the Confederacy, under the Confederate battle flag. Bury it, they say.

Next come county residents. Many speak of heritage, honor, and their own ancestors who died under that flag. They want it to fly on one particular weekend each year: the weekend of Lee-Jackson Day, a state holiday in January that infelicitously happens on the weekend preceding MLK Day. Some of them speak with voices breaking of the power a lost cause still holds, of the valor of their forebears and the losses they endured. They are white.

Also from the county are a handful of other voices, who speak of a different kind of family suffering: of  a life sentence of hard labor and sometimes cruel punishment, without any hope of parole. Of slavery, in short. They are black.

It’s testament to how far we have come that we are able to have this discussion. It’s testament to how far we have not come that we are still having this discussion. 

At one point, a young man in what looks like an Army cap, carrying a Confederate battle flag, comes to the microphone. He says 300,000 people died for this flag and he will use his allotted three minutes to honor them. He sits in silence. After about a minute, people in the room begin to murmur. 

The mayor leans forward. “Let him have his three minutes of silence, please,” she says. The room falls completely quiet. You can hear a pin drop. It stays that way.

A black man from the county says he’ll be glad to erect a flagpole on private property for anyone who wants to fly a Confederate flag at home. A white woman from Fairfield remarks that no one carrying a Confederate flag ever fired a shot at Lexington; those who did, did so under the Stars and Stripes.  A young woman from neighboring Buena Vista chokes back tears as she talks about her great-granddaddy’s death in battle. A college professor, Romanian by birth, likens Southern slavery to horrors her own people witnessed in another time and place. 

The weight of history and our common humanity lies heavy in the room, and despite our best efforts, we are largely talking past each other. Is anyone listening? 

By evening’s end, council has voted to limit flags flown on public poles to those of city, state and country. A spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans has said the organization will sue.

And in just a little more than a week, this nation will remember September 11, 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the day we call 9/11.  The unity that came of that disaster now lies in tatters on the floor of our nation’s Capitol building, while out here in the hill country, we are still fighting a war from a century ago – and I am not at all sure those two facts are unrelated.

Is anyone listening, America?

July 20

JULY 20 ... Yeah.

So, I’m coming out. About my age, that is. I’m 66 today, and why is it that we all want to remain younger than we actually are? I mean, after passing about 28 or 29.

For a long time, I was determined to be just 29. In spirit, at least.

These days, I find myself realizing my limits. And I’m only 66! But that means that in less than 5 years, I will be … 70. Better get my bucket list together, huh?

Actually, my list is very short. I’d like to go back to Britain and France. Some of my family once upon a time lived in Normandy, in the part where they make the Calvados. I loved the light in Provence, not to mention the lavender. I always thought I’d get to Greece. I once rode the Orient Express as far as Yugoslavia, back when there was one.

I’d like to travel this country again and see the parts I haven’t.

I wish I thought I’d teach again, but I think maybe I am getting too old to care how you choose to pluralize ox. Or sister-in-law. Or attorney general. Ya know?

With teaching, the real obstacle for me now is the Internet. Isn’t that ironic? The world’s biggest, most immediate source of information – which admittedly may need to be vetted, but then so did scholarly work back in the Dark Ages – the Web, I say, an obstacle?

It’s the chaos and the unrelenting time consumption … the fact that we need to sleep and it doesn’t … the fact that it will tell you everything-all-at-once … the fact that it’s infinite. And we are not.

So yeah, I can blog. I have a website. Several, in fact. I know how to Google. I can touch type. I love the immediacy. But it’s infinite, and I am not.

I’m mortal.

And I am wondering, so what? So maybe I have another 25 years on the planet? Or 30? And will the last 10 of those be any good? Or the last 20?

Better get my affairs in order. Try to figure out why we are here and what’s left to do. As the years pass – even dwindle – I know these things for sure: I will not be a geologist. Darn. I will not be a rock singer. Darn, but then I can skip a lot of tedious bus tours, not to mention skirting some of the potentially more hazardous drugs. I will never be worth a damn on a sewing machine, and I won’t be a distance swimmer either.

Hmm. I’ve forgotten most of the German I knew. And I probably won’t be mastering Arabic or Chinese. I won’t be a steeplechase rider.

But with luck, I may be a master naturalist. I may play the fiddle better. I may get to see all my friends at least one more time before we all shuffle off to Buffalo.

And that’s what 500 words will get you.