Memorial Day 1963
If you’re old enough, you remember when they called it Decoration Day. If you’re old enough, you’ve survived two and a half World Wars and any number of long holiday weekends.
Since the odds on the latter are considerably shorter, perhaps there should be a holiday dedicated to those killed on long holiday weekends, except that dying on the highways is part of that American way of life preserved by those whose deaths we are presumably honoring today.
I once asked a psychiatrist why Americans are still so shocked by deaths in plane crashes, while remaining uninvolved by the vastly larger automobile toll. “Simple,” he replied. “Taking a plane is an act of choice. Driving is as natural to an American as walking — perhaps more so.”
Besides it’s always somebody else who’s going to get killed, not you. Every man in uniform felt the same way, including those whose graves are supposed to be decorated with flowers today. I don’t know what one does to honor the thousands who simply disintegrated in the mud of battle fields like Arras in World War I.
In their memory, I suppose you could affix a plastic flower to the aerial of your car.
Today some speaker somewhere will remind us that our boys did not die in vain, a sentiment unspoken to this day by the victims or their survivors. The patriots who didn’t get killed are always around to tell us about somebody else’s last full measure of devotion.
However, the subject is fast becoming academic. War is “unthinkable,” and for this we have the word of people like Herman Kahn, who go on thinking about it. It is also “outdated,’ announced a physicist who is working on even more up-to-date weapons than those that overkill only up to a factor of 10, but are “dirty.” The nuclear stockpile contains the equivalent of 20 tons of TNT for every person on the face of the earth, and that’s progress.
` In the good old days of war there was a bullet with your number on it. Today 40,000 pounds of dynamite have been set aside for you, a flattering amount indeed.
All we learn from history is that we don’t learn anything from history. If we did, the orators today would be right, and all those thousands of young men would not have died in vain.
We’re spending 50-odd billion dollars a year on armaments — for defensive purposes only — because of The Other Guy, correct? To suggest otherwise would be unpatriotic. But if we read history (while not learning from it) we know it was no Red who said “The increase of armaments that is intended in each nation to produce consciousness of strength and a sense of security does not achieve these effects. On the contrary, it produces a consciousness of the strength of other nations and a sense of fear. Fear begets suspicion and distrust and evil imagining of all sorts.” Those are the words of Lord Grey of Falladon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1905-1915.
Nor was it a deluded, softheaded fellow traveler who pointed out: “As one who passed half a century in the study and practice of war, I suggest that you should give your support to disarmament and so do your best to ensure the promotion of peace.” That was Field Marshal Sir William Roberson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 19151918.
On this Memorial Day atop the nuclear stockpile there is still time to read that global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. No longer is it a weapon of adventure — the short cut to international power. If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No longer does it possess even the chance of the winner of a duel. It contains now only the germs of double suicide. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur has been heard from.
”Tell me who profits by war and I will tell you how to stop it,” Henry Ford once said. I think foxy old Henry knew, but didn’t want to offend some of his friends.
In a recent issue of the Saturday Evening Post, Dwight D. Eisenhower complained that “I have participated in two world wars, and there was one striking difference between the first and second that perplexed me and made me a little sad. The American Army in the first World War was a singing army; in the second it was not.”
Well, for one thing, there were better songs in the first war, but they died soon enough on the lips of the men who were slaughtered needlessly at Belleau Wood, the first American action. There wasn’t much singing after that and by the time World War II rolled around the songs had become third-rate and the troops had lost their naïveté, an invaluable ingredient if you are not to die in vain.
Mr. Eisenhower also felt impelled to report that he had seen the Irving Berlin musical, “Mr. President,” and had enjoyed it, although some critics had panned it as “corny.” Too many of us Americans are included to think of any honest emotion,
including a public display of patriotism, as “corny.” Not so. Patriotism might not be corny, but Irving Berlin is. The emotion that produced “God Bless America” was undoubtedly honest, which has nothing to do with the fact that it is a lamentably bad song.
Well we have corn on all sides this Memorial Day. A Women Strike for Peace group in an attempt at Madison Ave. humor, came up with a slogan reading, “If You Liked World War II, you’ll LOVE World War III!” God Bless America. And soon.
This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle May 29, 1963.