Carpe Diem: 2019.05.27 Memorial Day

In these pages over the years I have written admiringly of my uncles who served in WWI and WWII, three in combat roles, and one in the Army Air Force Orchestra.  They were my heroes when I was a boy, and they remain so. I never had any question of the validity of the wars in which they fought, but never found a subsequent American conflict that met the moral or ideological standards to initiate my own commitment to the military.  Indeed, there is a substantial generational divide that for most of my generation is cleaved by the Vietnam conflict. Since then my country has blundered and bullied its way into one unjust war or another and, at this writing is busy trying to provoke a war with Iran.

Memorial Day still has its parades and appropriate remembrances of those who have served in America’s wars, just and unjust, but between those seems on one’s television set one is likely to encounter a commercial by one or all of the branches of military service that is sadly indicative of the decline in moral clarity, the substitution of arms dealing for international diplomacy, Andy incessant drumbeat of bellicosity that is the soundtrack of at least half of our nation’s elected officials. War has become our largest industry and export and there is perhaps a no more apt expression of its commodification than Armed Forces commercials that are designed to be conflated with the video games that are played by the same demographic targeted as recruits. Fighter jets roar off of aircraft carriers, tanks tear through desert landscapes, and Robocop-like soldiers make their way to digital cities, rifles blazing. There is no sign of an enemy, no torn-up bodies of collateral damage– –it’s just like a video game.  And voiceover exhorts the player to “become something greater than yourself”.

And in a VA hospital somewhere is a young man, perhaps missing some limbs, or otherwise wounded and maimed for life, clicking his thumbs (if he is fortunate enough to have them) as he plays Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, though perhaps, in a quiet moment, feeling lesser then himself for having been exploited by his country that has been too long lesser than itself.