When exactly did we decide that the proper way to honor the war dead was a forty-percent-off sectional and a hot dog you didn’t want?
I spent Saturday evening at Eliza’s in Georgetown, where the centerpiece was peonies and the conversation was, as it always is the weekend after Memorial Day, somebody’s complaint about Reagan National. Three former State Department hands, a retired flag officer, and a lobbyist I’ll describe only as bipartisan because he charges both parties the same hourly rate. Nobody mentioned a name. Nobody mentioned a war. The flag officer talked about his boat.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent twenty-eight years at the National Archives and now spends most of her time gently telling tourists they cannot photograph things, sent me a 1947 pamphlet last week titled Decoration Day: A Citizen’s Conduct. It instructed Americans to lower their voices between eleven and noon, to wear no commercial insignia, and to refrain from “public merriment.” Judy found this funny. I found it indicting.
Because somewhere between 1947 and the long weekend that just concluded, we converted a day of mourning into a procurement opportunity. The local news wished me a “Happy Memorial Day,” which is the kind of phrase that should make a person flinch and no longer does. A grocery chain emailed me about saluting our heroes with a discount on shrimp. The President, who has opinions about most things, tweeted a photograph of himself.
The bipartisan lobbyist, sensing where I was going, said the economy “needs the long weekend,” and that grief, in his telling, was a luxury good — fine for countries that aren’t carrying our debt load. He said this while eating a piece of halibut that cost what a private first class makes in an afternoon. Nobody at the table corrected him. I include myself in that nobody, which is part of why I’m writing this down now and not then.
Here is what struck me, sitting on Eliza’s patio: we have been at war, in some form, for nearly a quarter century, and the men who started those wars are mostly on book tours. The men who fought them are mostly not in Georgetown. The names we are supposed to be remembering this weekend include a generation that came home to a Veterans Affairs system that loses their files and a Congress that cannot pass a budget without threatening to garnish their pensions. We honor them with a parade in towns small enough to still hold one, and a sale in towns large enough to have forgotten why.
And I want to be careful here, because the easy column is the one that blames the public for buying the mattress. The public is not the problem. The public was handed a holiday with the meaning sanded off and told to enjoy itself. The problem is the class of people who knew better and chose, over four decades of bipartisan effort, to let the meaning go — because a country that takes its dead seriously is a country that asks harder questions about why they died, and that is precisely the conversation Eliza’s table, and a hundred tables like it, has organized itself to avoid.
I am, as ever, just asking. But I will say this much plainly, because somebody should: a republic that cannot sit quietly with its own grief for one Monday in May is not a republic that should be trusted to declare another war. We are about to. We always are. And the receipts from this weekend’s sectional will outlast the eulogy nobody bothered to write.