Every memorial day and Veterans day I usually go up the the Oregon Vietnam Veterans Memorialat day break and walk the path to the top and then play amazing grace on my tin whistle. Not today. Just can't bring myself to do it. I have, as we used to say, "a case of the ass".
All the flag waving, speechifying, fly overs and POW flags leave me empty and worn out. As Ulysses S. Grant said; "The one thing I never want to see again is a military parade."
Yesterday I was at Sunday coffee with my vet friends and the subject of good old Colin Powell pimping his new book came up. The consensus was, "Why the fuck is that lying son of a bitch getting any face time?" The same can be said of all the lying sons of bitches who lead us into the quagmire of Iraq. Why do they get their asses kissed while those who were right still get vilified and ignored? I'm sick of it.
Here's something I wrote years ago after the Fleur-de-Kos.
War is a false god worshipped by warmongers and poll watchers; a false god worshipped by the media whores who wish to be bathed in its reflected glow; a false god worshipped by those who have never seen, heard, smelled or touched the obscenity of the violence they glorify. War is the promise breaker. As James Madison wrote in 1795,
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [Branch of Government] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
The flag is used by the war worshippers to incite and arouse the masses to their cause. They want mandatory pledges of allegiance in schools. They display it everywhere and anywhere. If you don’t have at least one article of clothing with a flag theme you must be unpatriotic. Put one on your car if you want to be a “real American”. Congress is back again with a flag desecration amendment, never mind that the President himself has desecrated the flag by signing one at the Republican Nation Convention. Or that the US Flag Code is violated every day by the thousands of tattered flags flying from the gutter mounts of cars of “real Americans”. Never mind that those who wave the flag the hardest are the ones who had “other priorities” when it was their time to serve. I have had many discussion with my fellow veterans on the flag. What it means to them and how it is used to sway public opinion. Many of them refuse to respect or honor it because it has flown over the scenes of horrible atrocities, because it has been used to advance a political agenda of war over peace. I understand their feelings completely.