Memorial Day Weekend All right, since you showed up, here comes the standard Holiday Weekend Speech. This won't be pretty, or even memorable. It will feature cliches stacked upon cliches like toy blocks, plumbed together with plastic and copper and glue, bound with wire to a fence post and left there to feed the crows. Happy Memorial Day. Have fun. Get your boat in the water. Grill some chicken and hamburgers, like I did last night. Get drunk, like I did last night. If you live in a brutally hot climate, stick your head under the hose and laugh it off. If you live where the corn is taking its time getting out of the ground, swat bugs and enjoy the sunset in a flannel shirt and dirty sweatpants. Get to know your golf clubs again. Re-introduce yourself to the Frisbee. If you reside near a lake, river, pond, reservoir or ocean, go take a dip (unless it's the Hudson we're talking about, of course). Take the kids, or the dogs, or both. Pile them all into the back of a pickup truck and for Pete's sake drive carefully. Drive carefully regardless, actually. You don't need to go a hundred miles an hour on the freeway; the world's still faster than you, so don't worry about it. And don't buckle up that seatbelt, either, because in doing so you're telling yourself, "I'm going to have an accident today", every time. That's like putting a cooler full of ice next to the miter saw, just in case you happen to cut off a couple of fingers (hey, it could happen). While you're doing all of this, consider that the reason for this three day party isn't to afford us the time to assemble that new piece of Nordic furniture. The extra day of quiet is supposed to mean more than a chance to rest our backs, aching as they might be from yardwork. Memorial Day wasn't made up by Hallmark and it isn't sponsored by brewing companies - although they do rely on the annual spike in sales at this time of year. Sure, professional sports as an institution has geared its scheduling to take advantage of our autopilot revelry. So watch the games. Pop some corn. If you see a really striking ad for a new car, go to the big tent blowout sale and buy one. Buy two. It's the American way, don't you know? Kick back and relax on some new leather showroom furniture. Write it up; there's no interest until 2007. Whatever it is that will make the weekend great, do that. You owe it, not to yourself, but to every poor, brave American soul that was ever lost on foreign soil. They were stopped in their tracks, many as teenagers, so you that could stand around with a dripping barbecue brush in hand, cold beer from a can slopped down the front of your tee-shirt. They felt their pulses slowing down along with the loss of their blood so that you could have an extra day to wax your SUV. When all else was done and gone, they cried out for their mothers and died. All for you. Honoring the fallen does not mean worshipping the military, which, under its current civilian guidance, has done plenty of dishonorable things of late. The truth is that a few dozen acts of cruelty and misbehavior should not take away from the overall solid performance of our troops under the most trying of circumstances. Fighting a war on behalf of an administration that is equal parts dumb and corrupt cannot be easy. The Lynndie Englands of the Army should not be held up as examples of our fighting men and women. It brings unneccessary attention and furor, diminishes the greatness of their sacrifices, and it is good for nobody that their stains have become the uniform's focal point. The Pentagon's response, to heap all the blame on "a few bad apples", was not helpful at all. The government abdicated our national honor when they lied to the country about Pat Tillman's death, never mind his grieving family. They forfeited bouquets when they "sexed up" the capture and rescue of Jessica Lynch - even she feels that way. Stop-loss orders that keep soldiers in harm's way past the duration of their contracts are wrong. Sending troops out on operations in a combat zone without adequate armor on their vehicles or on their bodies is worse. Unless it was your loved one, you don't deserve to have the memories of the young people who lost their lives when the president conjured up a war out of a few manila folders' worth of bogus claims, and was nonetheless re-elected. So it's convenient that the same president won't allow photographers near those flag-draped coffins. You don't want that anyway. It's a reminder of the unacceptable. Yet we accept it. Hell, we're going to celebrate it, with all the dignity one brings to the task of digging the sandy mesh of one's swimming trunks out of the crack of one's ass. Whatever, have a good weekend. Enjoy the sales. Slather on the sunblock, go out and do nothing. Hold your hands up in front of your face and just stare at them against the blue sky. Not everyone is as lucky as you are. Happy Memorial Day. Paul Heller 05/27/05 << back to the archives
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