Ultimately, it is important that any process of memorialization confront what memorials do well, and what they don't do. National memorials traditionally have been built with dual purposes: to instruct the nation's citizens about patriotism (often using historical figures, such as war heros, both living and dead), and to honor the dead.

The tendency to teach by dictum is one the state cannot resist. Yet, by anyone's accounting nowadays, few among the citizenry actually participate in any sort of Memorial Day observance. In fact, to address this perceived affront, there has been an official movement afoot to correct our lack of patriotism on the day, which you can read all about here at the "Help Restore the Traditional Day of Observance for Memorial Day" page:

http://www.usmemorialday.org/act.html

Memorials do not teach well about history, since that communal function is superseded on individual levels by bereaved families who choose to remember those who died rather than to understand why they died. One can visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Oklahoma City National Memorial without understanding, for instance, the fraught history of the Vietnam War and the reasons why American lives were lost in Vietnam, or what aspects of American society gave rise to the right-wing ideology that bombed Oklahoma City. It is important that any communal memorializing done to mourn the individual dead not foreclose on discussions about why their lives were lost. Yet that is exactly what memorialization by dictum does.

The memorials that resonate most powerfully within a culture are those that allow those debates to continue, that don't try to contain history and memory, or censor it. Rather they create a space where memorials are generated in all their conflict.

It is no coincidence that in this post-modern era, our demands for individual memorializing within the public sphere leads us back to more ancient ways of remembering the dead. I think more and more families are choosing to do just that--remember their war dead on their terms, not the nation's, and to mourn and grieve privately, not publicly. Prior to the Civil War in the US, memorializing of the war dead was always, always a private family affair, led by war widows. In the post-Civil War era, the role of the war widows was co-opted by the male military and political leaders who wished to use the Decoration Day, and Soldiers' Memorial Days as days when they could further their own agendas and purposes by standing beside the public memorial sites, and being put on pedestals floated in Memorial Day parades. Is it any wonder so many families of the war dead never participate in such shams? We know the score, and we don't wish to have the memories of our loved ones used and abused by politicians looking to buy our votes with cheap patriotic sentiments.

In the face of absence of our war dead, especially an absence so violently and tragically wrought at the cost of so many lives, all people feel a need to create a presence of some kind to fill that painful void. I realize it is considered unAmerican, especially in the wake of 9/11, to suggest that the celebration of Memorial Day is an empty, hollow one, but for me and my family, it is.

In many of the most powerful memorials I have ever seen, such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which incorporates the skeletal ruins of a building, and many World War II memorials, such as Coventry Cathedral in England, or the preserved Nazi concentration camps--the memorials speak to history in their preservation of the ruins of destroyed structures. For the most part, these memorials use the shards of the past to convey a warning and a bitter message about the human capacity for violence.

Sadly, I see none of that in the US Memorial Day celebrations. And until I do, I and my family will remain anti-Memorial Day. I do no disgrace to the fallen war dead to take such a stance. It is because of the obscenity of the carnage of war, that I demand more of my country in this regard. I demand that we at least make some attempt, no matter how feeble, to keep a bitter message about the human capacity for violence, in the equation when we celebrate the day.

If that makes me an outcast at Mudcat, well I can live with quite comfortably with that.