Let Us Honor The Troops With Peggy Noonan, A Columnist Famous To Children
While you hamburger sacks may conceive of Memorial Day as little more than a free 24-hour session of experimental masturbation R&D, it is actually a "memorial" to those Americans, throughout our History, who have laid down their lives in the service of the King. Your Wonkette would like to thank and honor The Troops past and present, in Mexico and Afghanistan, in Vietnam andCambodiaVIETNAM. Because as notable American word-writer Peggington Noonington opines today, the U.S. hasn't celebrated any brave war heroes since the strife of the Sixties. (She offers no mention of two of the most popular Americans in America right now, Colin Powell and David Petraeus; perhaps she had imbibed too muchAlckoholl.) Let us quote her words and hope that one day, George Washington shall be worthy to our hobbits anew.
More than most nations, America has been, from its start, a hero-loving place. Maybe part of the reason is that at our founding we were a Protestant nation and not a Catholic one, and so we made "saints" of civil and political figures. George Washington was our first national hero, known everywhere, famous to children. When he died, we had our first true national mourning, with cities and states re-enacting his funeral. There was the genius cluster that surrounded him, and invented us—Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. Through much of the 20th century our famous heroes were in sports (Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, the Babe, Joltin' Joe) the arts (Clark Gable, Robert Frost) business and philanthropy (from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates) and religion (Billy Graham). Nobody does fame like America, and they were famous.
The category of military hero—warrior—fell off a bit, in part because of the bad reputation of war. Some emerged of heroic size—Gens. Pershing and Patton, Eisenhower and Marshall. But somewhere in the 1960s I think we decided, or the makers of our culture decided, that to celebrate great warriors was to encourage war. And we always have too much of that. So they made a lot of movies depicting soldiers as victims and officers as brutish. This was especially true in the Vietnam era and the years that followed. Maybe a correction was in order: It's good to remember war is hell. But when we removed the warrior, we removed something intensely human, something ancestral and stirring, something celebrated naturally throughout the long history of man. Also it was ungrateful: They put themselves in harm's way for us.
For Memorial Day, then, three warriors, two previously celebrated but not so known now by the young.
Meh, haven't read the rest, and it's just about time... ah, right now actually, is time to go play the soccer game on Xbox.
Happy warring, Peggy & Wonkette readers! And keep safe, Troops.
Those Who Make Us Say "Oh!" [Yowza! -- Ed.][Wall Street Journal]