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| ESSAY:MEMORIAL DAYS | |
 May 29, 2000 
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ROGER ROSENBLATT: In 1866, Henry C. Welles, a druggist in the village of Waterloo, New York, mentioned to General John B. Murray that he thought the graves of the Civil War dead should be honored with decorations. So began Decoration Day, which became Memorial Day--an odd American holiday that throws together images of the first playful rites of summer and the last rites of those who died in our wars. Shuttling between these stations of present and past is the operation of memory-- it is Memorial Day-- memory, the mute gravedigger that brings the past into the present, and changes what is by the revival of what was. The American way of death has always swung between the extremes of denial and desire. These days it tends towards desire. We actively seek to create memorials these days: Silent, complicated, open to the public and to every interpretation. People who have suffered civic disasters, create or plan to create monuments for events like the killings at Columbine High School, and the Oklahoma City bombing, where a memorial of bronze and glass chairs serves as a collective witness to the past horror, under the present activity. The dead overlook the city, and one may sit symbolically with them. Once upon a time, a war was consecrated by the statue of a grand heroic general on a horse, who stood for single purposes, virtues of valor and sacrifice. Today, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington honors not the generals alone, but everyone who fought and died, and says only that they died, which in turn suggests a more suspicious take on heroism. Death itself it memorialized in the Holocaust Museum, because the names of the murdered are too many to count. There are memorials to women in the military. SPOKESMAN: Go with throttle up. SPOKESMAN: Throttle up. ROGER ROSENBLATT: To those who gave their lives in pursuit of the space program; to a Japanese American internment camp in World War II. (Shouting) To the 42 sites of the bloody civil rights years. There will finally be a memorial to World War II. America, in middle age, is prepared to look back with more complexity than it once was. Modern memorials, like modern art, are unassertive, deliberately vague. The feelings engendered are personal, and changeable. The memorials to high school students and bombing victims both comfort the families and challenge the wider citizenry to understand an event. GIRL SINGING: Let there be peace on earth. The peace that was meant to be... ROGER ROSENBLATT: People almost rush to create memorials these days. John F. Kennedy, Jr. dies; immediately there are flowers at his door. Kids are killed in the inner city; immediately there are murals and names painted on walls. Memory and sorrow, even when it seems formulaic and a little easy, has achieved an equal place with forward-looking progress. In short, the country, as it grows older, seems to be joining other, older civilizations in accepting death and loss as part of its being. Now it wants to comprehend the meaning, the lesson, of death and loss. What will people make of the Oklahoma Chairs or the Vietnam Wall in the year 2100? Probably no more than we make of the lists of the names of those who died in World War I. For the moment, it would seem to be enough that the deaths are honored, and that we are working out what honoring them means. Old memorials stood for certain values, new ones stand for the search for values. These are our Memorial Days. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. |
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