Memorial Day 2005

A pleasant day, contrary to forecasts.

I find myself wandering a cemetery in Dunkirk, Ohio --this
graveyard terminus of a tiny parade wherein my eldest son,
a 4-H'er, is marching with his dog.

My two-year-old boy is beside me. He wants poppa to lift him up
onto the monuments to play, is frustrated by my hesitation.

No anxiety in him about desecration, about disrespecting the dead.
In this he is as unselfconscious as George W. Bush placing a wreath.

This my forty-fifth Memorial Day. Impossible heap. My last grandparent
died just a few weeks ago. Fine summer days -- how many remain to me?

We drift past a weathered old stone on the periphery of the yard.
Slight shock of recognition. "Valentine Amspaugh," a Civil War vet,
his final resting place. A tiny flag flutters over the stone, a last
pathetic gasp of gratitude.

How many dead today in Iraq, I wonder?

And my sons -- will their names appear on some future casualty list?

Here comes the band.

Newsweek--author of all our woe!

Inquiry by U.S. Finds 5 Cases of Koran Mistreatment

By THOM SHANKER
Published: May 27, 2005, in New York Times

An American military inquiry has uncovered five instances in which guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba mishandled the Koran, but found "no credible evidence" to substantiate claims that it was ever flushed down a toilet, the chief of the investigation said on Thursday.

[we continue the story . . .]

"Sure," said Brig. General Jay W. Hood, "we creased the Koran, we tore the Koran, we tossed the Koran, we kicked the Koran, we stomped the Koran, we shot the Koran, we burned the Koran, we licked the Koran, we pissed on the Koran, we wiped menses on the Koran, but we never were so disrespectful as to flush the Koran down a toilet. Give us a little credit for cultural sensitivity, will ya?"

Meanwhile the White House through spokesman Scott McClellan has assigned blame to Newsweek for the death of Pat Tillman, recent hurricanes in Florida, and the miserable performance of the Cincinnati Reds' bullpen this season. The magazine has issued an abject apology for these lapses in journalistic intergity. "Jesus what ratpuke we are," remarked Associate Editor Mia Kulpa.

homo homini lupus

Listening on the way to work to a report on a soldier dead in Iraq, a male in his early twenties. Killed by an IED. They profiled him, his family in grief. The older brother recalling fondly his sibling's first deer kill: how he crouched, quiet and still, in the blind, how finally a buck came close enough, how he shot, how the deer flopped, how the boy of sixteen ran whooping across the field to tag his prize.

Picturing the insurgent in ambush. Waiting, waiting for the patrol, adrenaline surging, breath in gasps. Then, as the trucks rumble by, setting off the bomb, the thud and roar of the explosion, the smoke, the fire, the wreck, the screams of the wounded. The exhilaration of the insurgent, his pleasure in mere slaughter.

I snap off the radio in disgust. What abject creatures we are.