Memorial Dei

(No propaganda pictures were used in this polemic)

May Ramtha be with you all on this Memorial Day holiday. I personally have always been foggy on the subject of the memorial day extended weekend. On its general meaning. Of course it was always apparent we were commemorating the endless dead men brought out of being by my cuntry's rabid hunger for warfare and campaigns of "defense" of the interests of foreign, ungeographically-bound capital, and even sometimes, the interests merely of specific banks, as in Haiti for a spell. (Though that was not even War in the grossly improper and unfounded sense of most of our wars: it was a straight-up, highly focused and extralegal marine expedition, undertaken to suppress the insurgent Haitian people's renewed effort at running their own show, which meant messing with "their" Central Bank and the lazy, unhelpful capital laying about in it. Which means trouble and occupation by the nearest military arm of the Predominant World Fascist Enterprise; the very enterprise that people who consecrate holidays like this weekend's and who determine what history texts indoctrinate you are never going to admit exists at all.)

What i was trying to explain before being sidetracked by extraordinarily minor details of national military history, is that Memorial Day also seemed to me to have a different function. It was an inauguration of Summer, which both Snopes and Wikipedia will confirm. They will also confirm that there's great debate about the origins of the holiday, and my scan of the Snopes entry even seems to be trying to induce schizophrenia in the reader. In one literally jaundiced paragraph, headed by the ominous words, "Know Your History," Snopes explains that in Charleston, at the tail of the War of International Aristocrat-Banking Aggression Staged Enduringly in mid-19th century America, many newly freed African and mixed-blood slaves had a massive parade of thousands of people, and reburied the disinterred remains of several hundred Union Soldiers what had died and been entombed in the soil of a Confederate prison camp. Other paragraphs not helpfully blocked off in yellow explain that there is a separate formal origin to the commemorative day, but also a literal, congressionally mandated and decreed origin, in 1971. Have you ever considered that anyone who is internet-smart is rather like a human file cabinet for dodgy facts and ultimately meaningless speculation, or an animal that can survive by eating its own poop?

I would confuse the holiday with Labor Day all the time, and one other, i think, that begins with an "M." And i could probably be forgiven throughout all these years of my extended boyhood, for having a more firm impression of Memorial Day as being a day---even a full-blown carnival---for celebrating the ownership of a boat, right at that time of year where a boat is most useful, even cathartic. To get out and consume alcohol while commanding a giant, fast motor vehicle and still be somewhat legal, which anyone who has done so will tell you is tremendous fun. Of course many times i was in Arkansas, the Ozarks, for Memorial Day, and mountain people are usually very sensible and don't need much of an excuse to frolic on the water as the heat and humidity start to get nasty.

I do not at all mean to make light of all the many millions of needlessly dead and murdered young American sons and daughters who have been shipped and forward-presenced off to war for any random desire of those who lord over the earth in perfect anonymity and security. We should really be trying to remember them at all times, just as are the many torn up lovers and parents and children and friends they have left behind in incalculable numbers that at this point appear as if they won't ever stop growing. There's no doubt in my mind that i'd feel less queasy about an American day of Mourning for our war dead if there was a counterpart that we celebrated. Say, one month of mandated mourning for the immeasurable numbers of human beings we've killed when we decide willy-nilly as we tend to, to make war on them and their unregulated opium fields, and oil fields, etc.

It happens that i recently came to know a very nice, empathetic man, a truly kind-hearted man, who "served," as they say, in Iraq the last time a government nominally headed by the Bush cartel invaded that country. He has PTSD and seems to be treating it with LSD and alcohol. I mean this in a completely non-judgmental way. He's a true psychonaut and i hold him in high esteem. I rarely encounter his breed of very natural empathy in this cruel and comatose world. People harass him at the bar he owns---an anxious, self-conscious and desperately woke watering hole. Yes I’ve seen from time to time that they hector him in their crass, bourgeois way, over his willing participation in that almost forgotten war. Millennials, you know, forget even more prodigiously and quickly than any previous generation. But they always keep the spirit of censure and acrimonious feedback alive, with the help of Donald Trump. But this cultural, en masse memory loss: it’s a scandalous and disease-bearing reality that we may blame not only on the insane level of gadgetry-use they are devoted to from their earliest consciousness, which so disables their sense of what is real and what is socially good and of Why a human being should not constantly be seeking to distract and indulge themselves with the slightest effort and most reliable success. No, we also must blame the hideous propaganda efforts that have been expended over the millennia to warp and ruin their hearts and minds.

It’s unpleasant to see these junior lemmings and philosophical dwarfs berate a man that went to war, unpleasant even for me. Even as innocently, fundamentally opposed to and disgusted by war as I’ve always been since the first time I received its absurd explanation as an obstinate but natural condition of human life. It’s unpleasant to see, mostly because these young people clearly spend most of their waking time cultivating the extremely spare portions of their personality which they pray and imagine are interesting. When they are not trying to find sexual gratification, and we know how closely both these efforts are connected.

But those propaganda efforts. Some point to G.I. Joe, or perhaps to Hasbro and Mattel and whoever controls the reins of these creatures. Some quite correctly, like very wise babies what can make sense of the most obvious material phenomena, point to the endless and malevolent effluences of that reeking pit of despair and devilry we know as Hollywood. They note very often that Hollywood has intimate partnerships with the national security state and all its branches. So that the "A-Team" (for one terrible TV instance whose ideological influence i myself barely escaped) might in a sense be perceived as a formal rehabilitation effort, hatched to repair the mutilated reputation of the US Military soon after its decade-long rape and desecration of Vietnam.

Some point very wisely and correctly, like college students before whose eyes the scales had dropped before it was too late and they had received their shining diplomas and headgear, to Operation Gladio, and to Edward Bernays. Oh that skulking bane of history, E-Bern. Oh that sickening Great Man of History view of human existence, which is ever so comforted by conjuring up a single devil to explain campaigns of murder, greed and wanton despoliation of the earth that span generations. Yes that devil was as much conjured as born. Just watch him slowly consume that raw steak in that BBC documentary.

It must be one of those peculiar coincidences of history and genetic predestination that accounts for why Edward Bernays’ great grandson was a founding force behind Netflix.

And so it begins to appear as if the disastrous nature of human political life, which can at least reportedly/pedagogically be summed up as “warfare and pillage, and the capture of certain ethnic groups for profit and labor exploitation,” has eventually to be disguised by things like national holidays, and consciously erected national frameworks for the continuous maintenance of jingoism, and nationalism. I think those two concepts really just boil down to a coercion of the masses of people and suffering parents, towards accepting random, wanton warfare. It has nothing to do with anthems and this bizarre, abstract allegiance to certain patches of geography. It is a protection racket at its root, and a pretense of concern, or so it seems. And if it were not so completely ridiculous a false, contrived confabulation and conceit, then the regular services of the god-damned NFL and that nauseating white boy, Captain America, would not be needed like some sort of mandated, weekly inoculation. Tony Stark, the human, anthropomorphized tank, would also not need such a gauche, obvious, immoral rehabilitation from heartless capitalist weapons dealer to god-damned Super-Hero. G.I. Joe, while heroically baby-sitting whole generations of pre-pubescent boys, would not be shooting Non-Lethal lasers all over TV, every day, right at the time when school lets out, if not in service of the national fantasy of well-being In Spite of it All, In Spite of The Rampant Homicide of it All. “Star Wars” and its millions of black and blue bedsheets, rebirths, and afterbirths might not exist at all. Tried have you to imagine the general reaction to being opposed to a holiday like Memorial Day on principle, in 2019. Have you forgotten the day them towers literally disappeared into dust.

It’s tempting finally to reckon that we need Memorial Day of the dead as a national cry of mute and unreflective pain, a designated day of exuberant entry into summer, for the specific spiritual need we have to Forget About All of The Wars Themselves, and Their Coded Reasons, and the implacable systems they support and maintain. In a much more conscious way, they haven’t forgotten war in the Philippines or Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam or Cambodia and Laos, or in places like Hawaii, which we conquered without even declaring any serious kind of war at all, choosing very economically instead just to threaten the natives with the presence of arrogantly OP’d warships. Japan remembers so that we don’t gotta, maybe. Memorial Day would not be quite so effective, perhaps, if it occurred in Fall, or Winter.

The anti-capitalist will chime in with a ready agreement, and sing that the disasters of modern capitalism are so great and the workers and bourgeoisie of the imperial lands so ambivalently but in the end directly culpable for them, that the State has an existential need to constantly be honoring their dead, with fanfare and paid leave. Their coerced dead. Remember, propaganda is coercion. At least in the mawkish, fusty opinion of some people.

I don’t know how Smedley Butler ever slipped through the cracks of this monstrous edifice. Perhaps he and his glorious faery tale come from the shill factory, I’ve been forced to wonder. But you see, I’ve been exposed to so much beautiful and constantly reinforced, ritual propaganda and crisis acting that it curdles the instinct of reason more than a little bit, and I’m left not being very certain about history and what this or that calendar event means. Most of them do seem to celebrate some proven delusion, anyway. One of the best things about calendars and pro sports leagues is their regularity, one supposes.

Mattel toys was founded in 1945, interestingly. Some more of that nationally very productive legerdemain and pharmacology, perhaps, perhaps.