I‘ve written on this date in previous years (notably here and here), and it occurs to me as I look back over the records I have in this webspace (nearly ten years of them, now!) that it is a bit odd that I’ve only written as many times as I have on the date. As with a similar recent observance, however, I don’t know that I have anything to add to already-existing discussions of the events commemorated today; I’m not a historian whose work covers the 1940s, and I’ve already told my parents “Happy 44th Anniversary,” so that brings me more or less to the end of topical commentary.

Not that that will stop me from rambling on about something else. So much should be obvious by this point.

I have known a few people who took part in the events 81 years past, although I cannot claim to have known them well. Growing up where I did, it was unavoidable; growing up when I did, “known them well” was not something very much available. I cannot say with certainty what many of them would think about today, although I can guarantee that many of them would find much fault with how things are–and I’d even agree with some of them. (Not all, of course, but my curmudgeonly self doesn’t agree with anyone on everything–not even my curmudgeonly self.)

One point that I recall having heard voiced and with which I agree is appreciation that there has not been such a thing happen since as happened then. There have been fights, conflicts, wars since, to be sure; there are still many of each ongoing. But the scale and scope…those have not been equaled, so far as I know, and I do not think that such a thing could be wholly hidden anymore. (Whether that’s a good thing or not, I cannot say; most likely, like most things, it’s both.) That there has not been so large a thing, that so many have not had to face such things at once, I have been told by some who were there is a good thing; I cannot argue the point, and I do not care to try.

I have ideas about the lingering effects of such events. I have not done the work to bear them out fully; I do not have access to the resources that would allow me to do so, and I am not sure how many such still exist or would continue to exist long enough for me to be able to find them. The life I live now has many attractions, but access to research apparatus is not one of them, not for most things, not really. But I know that at least some of those attractions are results of what happened 81 years ago today, just as I know a great many of them result from what happened 44 years ago today, and insofar as those are true, I am grateful for what took place–even as I share the hope that the earlier kind of thing never happens again.

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A time of year has come again about which I have written several times before (here, here, here, here, and here). It might well be thought that, with five earlier commentaries about Memorial Day in place, I’d not have more to say about the matter, that I’d’ve exhausted myself in noting the ostensible purpose of the observance and the complicated, nuanced, fraught, and sometimes contradictory actualities of the same. And since it appears once again that a Memorial Day weekend is not seeing me uproot my family and relocate to another part of the world, that avenue of discussion would seem to be cut off, as well.

It’s true that, this time, I’m not going to wax loquacious about the ways in which the day’s observance fails to live up to its promise. I’m not going to launch into some seething semblance of a Jeremiad this time around. I’ve done both before, clearly, and it is just as clear that my doing so does no good. I don’t feel better from some kind of catharsis, and my voice is all too easily drowned out by the cacophony into which I have shouted it so many times in the past.

No, this time, I will simply make note that the day is the day that it is, and I may perhaps find some moment to silently reflect on things. Other than that, I have work to do, and I have my family to attend to, and either of those things would be enough to occupy me well. That I have both is a blessing, and I am not unmindful of it.

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Two years ago, I wrote a rumination on Cinco de Mayo, the commemoration of the Mexican victory over France at Puebla. I’ve had a chance to look back over the piece, and I stand by the assertions I made in it. I remain pleased to celebrate a portion of my wife’s heritage and my daughter’s, and I acknowledge the fraught history that underlies such of my own (trained, not inborn) heritage as I do so. Too, I will be going to look for tacos for dinner tonight; I do still love me some tacos.

As I write now, though, I have to think things are even more fraught than they were before. The prevailing political rhetoric at work–not only where I am and have been, but also more broadly–is not one that would seem to lend itself to any kind of multiculturalism, even that which was subsumed into something of a gestalt cultural identity decades and more ago. I know I am not the only one who was taught with pride about the six flags to have flown over Texas, and it continues to boggle my mind that groups of people who in so many other ways have not advanced beyond the understandings inculcated into them in fourth grade have moved away from one of them that might actually have some good in it. But then, many things do boggle me.

For my own part, I do what I little I can to learn more about that history, including the unpleasant parts of it that are often elided in the name of “teaching true history,” the parts that proceed not from Great Man narratives traditionally promulgated because they present a whitewashed vision of events such as conduce to the formation of particular opinions. And even if we assume, as many do, that the Great Man narratives presented are reasonably accurate insofar as they go, they are not representative; the records left behind in diaries and journals, in the logs of junior soldiers and on the backs of kitchen cabinet doors, do more to describe how things were for the majority of people, the kind of people among whom I would have been had I been then and not died young from some malady that modern medicine and vaccines easily address (I have never been the kind of medievalist who longs to live in the bygone days I studied, in large part because I have studied them, and I’m not much more fond of many more recent times). It is less easy.

It is less convenient to learn such things than it is to learn others. It does oblige me to look at myself and my background more carefully and closely and to deal with the ways in which those I have succeeded succeeded because others were made to fail. It is also a fuller and more accurate thing, and it does give me some hope that, rather than failing to live up to the examples of the past, I might well be able to move beyond them.

Trite as it is to say, things can’t get better if they stay the same.

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It is once again the time of year in which the United States pauses to reflect upon and celebrate those who have held what is supposed to be its highest office. It is therefore once again the time of year in which I find myself wrestling with that reflection and celebration, trying not to fall into the traps of hero-worship and hero-denial, that of unthinking veneration or that of reflexively cynical denial of what good has been done in office by many of those who have held it.

I am well aware, living where I do for as long as I have, that there are many who are not pleased to see particular people in the office, now or at any of several points in the past. I am also well aware that nobody who has held the office has been a pure soul; even the greatest to have sworn the prescribed oath of office has erred, has failed, has faltered. The one in this page’s image, often held to be, indeed, the greatest of them…there are reasons that his first inaugural address is little reported, while his second is perennially republished–and there are other issues that do not take much looking to find. With even the best of them thus…nuanced…those who are less must me all the more so–which, again, does not take much looking to find.

I know I end up being a contrarian much of the time, rising to take an oppositional view regardless of the notion voiced. It is not one of my more charming character traits, and I wonder as I look back now how I developed it; the practice has certainly not done me much, if any, good during my life, and it has occasioned no small amount of harm to me, physically and socially. I have been working on it, albeit not with as much success as I would like to have had–but then, I never do do as well as I hope to do. I wonder if, in keeping with that work, I ought to set aside my ruminations, raise a flag, and let it wave in the winds that are blowing through my part of the Texas Hill Country even now, standing to face it with my hand over my heart–for I have never had the right to salute it, as no few have reminded me, and with varying degrees of distaste for me in their voices as they have done so–and simply join along in the celebrations I know are ongoing. How much of a coward and a liar would it make me to do so? How much wiser a man would I be if I did?

Holidays and observances, for me, are more often invitations to reflection and consideration than for celebration. I am not a happy man, as those who know me know, and as those who read me have had ample opportunity to find out. Joy does not come easily to me, and revelry is not much more commonly my guest. I think that much is clear from my writing, as well. Even on so relatively restricted and minor a holiday as this–and it is restricted and minor, even in the mythos of the place it is celebrated–I find myself responding to the invitation once again, turning inward rather than looking outward for what I can praise. I wonder if it would be better for me to do so or if it would be better for me to have more company as a guest.

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