Kieran Healy has authored a post about Memorial Day over at Crooked Timber that seems designed to get lots of people hopping mad. It no doubt will succeed. Here is the entire post, titled “Memorial Day”:
For those of us in the U.S., today is Memorial Day. America has a fine tradition of military service and sacrifice. The best way to respect and honor it is to reflect on what it means to serve and perhaps die for your country, and to think about the value of the cause, the power of the reasons, and the strength of the evidence you would need before asking somone—someone like your brother, or friend, or neighbor—to take on that burden. That so many are willing to serve is a testament to the character of ordinary people in the United States. That these people have, in recent years, shouldered the burden of service for the sake of a badly planned war begun in the name of an ill-defined cause, on the thinnest of pretexts, and with the most flimsy sort of evidence, is an indictment of the country’s political class.
It seems to me that this exactly what Memorial Day doesn’t mean. Memorial Day is about honoring the sacrifice of those who gave up their lives fighting in the name of the United States. It is about the living honoring the dead, recognizing their passing and reaffirming our memory and appreciation for what they did. It is about the troops, the grunts, the front-line soliders who left home and did not return. Memorial Day is not a time to separate out which of the dead served and died for good reasons or bad; to second-guess which decisions to declare war, launch a campaign or charge a hill were justified or not; or to test your ability to invent a populist voice to make cheap shots against an Administration you despise. [Ed.- That was a cheap shot by me. Mea culpa.] I’m sure there are good times for that, but Memorial Day isn’t one of them.
UPDATE: Kieran has responded in an update here, and a bunch of us are carrying on the discussion in the comment section.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Did President Bush make a similar misstep? Here is his speech today delivered at Arlington National Cemetary. Most of the speech is perfectly appropriate, but I do think there are a few sentences that can be fairly criticized. In particular, quoting from a letter written by a recently-deceased soldier to the effect that “I do wish America could see how awesome a job we’re doing [in Iraq]” seems inappropriate on Memorial Day. In my view, Memorial Day is about honoring sacrifice, not about trying to suggest that the war in Iraq was a good idea (Bush) or a bad idea (Healy). I recognize that honoring sacrifice can be seen as bound up with the merits of the decision to go to war, but I think it’s best to keep them apart.
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