ONE OF THE CHILDHOOD memories I have of my maternal grandparents is riding with them on Memorial Day to a cemetery somewhere in Michigan so my grandmother could put fresh flowers on her father’s grave and replace the flag in the bronze-wreathed GAR flag-holder that commemorated his service in the Civil War. I do not remember what automobile we were in, so I cannot say with any certainty what year it was, but given other details, I suspect it was 1948 or 1949, and the cemetery was probably in northern Lower Michigan, most likely somewhere in Roscommon County. In fact if I remember correctly we were returning from early season trout fishing at the place everyone in that family called “the Cottage,” a small infinitely snug white frame house on the South Branch of the fabled Au Sable River, one of the world’s legendary trout streams, in a blessed realm of towering pines, white-trunked birches and air deliciously perfumed by the spice-scent of sweet fern. It was not a particularly remote region, but because of its outhouses and wood-burning stoves and hand-pumped well-water that truly caressed your taste buds, it was a wondrous place seemingly light-years from despoilment by civilization, a domain of Pure Nature that had not yet been violated by either telephone or electricity, and indeed well into the 1950s remained genuine wilderness: my original Samothrace, my personal holy land.
Nor is this an aging writer’s absent-minded digression: the Cottage was built by my grandmother’s father on land he had been granted for his military service – a mid-19th Century equivalent of the G.I. Bill, just as GAR stood for Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War equivalent of the American Legion – and though my maternal great grandfather died years before I was born, it was in large measure by the Cottage that I knew him. By any and all accounts, he was a truly great man. His name was Henry Heber Woodruff, officially “the Honorable” because of a judgeship, but also because of a much greater truth, the valiant and honorable service he had rendered the Union in the 16th Regiment of Michigan Infantry, where he stood with his comrades in that bloodiest of bloody fights at Little Round Top – the pivotal Gettysburg battle for which the 20th Maine earned greater renown but in which the 16th Michigan fought just as bravely and decisively. Indeed he soldiered through the entire war and was mustered out a captain – a company commander. My grandmother still had his sword, and I – typical bloodthirsty child – was fascinated by it and the stories it might have told.
But Grandpa Woodruff’s ultimate legacy – at least for me – was spiritual. It was because of my fortunate connection to the Cottage he built on the South Branch of the AuSable that I was granted the freedom to wander deep woods, and it was the awareness I brought out of those deep woods that would lead me on a lifelong spiritual quest: another story for another time (and in this public space, maybe not ever) – though what is “quest” but a synonym for life itself?
When I was a child, Memorial Day was often still called “Decoration Day” and I believe it was my grandmother who explained to me that while it had come to be a day for honoring all our nation’s war dead, it was originally the day on which the Civil War’s dead were honored. The history of that day is described in detail here – though I should make it clear I do NOT support the appended petition to cancel the present three-day holiday. It is not an aside to note how that petition, though ostensibly motivated by patriotism, is more likely motivated by the Demo/Publican war against working families – a war so successful, the U.S. worker already puts in more hours and gets less time off than any other worker in any other industrialized country in the world. Thus I would no more sign that petition than I would willingly sign an agreement to work more hours for less pay – though that is precisely what is being forced on us every day by the ever-more-outsourced, ever-more-downsized George Bush economy. In this context, I am not sure what is more obscene: to camouflage in patriotic rhetoric a brazen attempt to worsen the lot of working families, or to overtly vandalize war memorials as reported here.
At least the politicians demonstrate the shameless step-right-up presumptuousness of their snake-oil kindred. The vandals, in contrast, show us nothing but pathological tantrums fueled by bottomless cowardice. They claim to be Leftists, but theirs is a pseudo-Left the violence of which proves their alleged pacifism an even greater falsehood. In their craven fear and raging hatred of all soldiers of all times is revelation of their malevolent elitism: they make no secret of their ultimate contempt for those of us they believe “reactionary” enough to serve in the military. Thus they spit in my great-grandfather’s face, they spit in my face, they spit in all our faces, thereby revealing once again the toxic malignancy that has eaten away the heart of the Democratic Party. Such is the venom for which we must somehow find an antidote if we are ever to take back the government from the Cheap Labor Republicans and their Big Business allies: those who would reduce all the rest of us to the implicit serfdom of the Herbert Hoover years, a serfdom from which we were rescued by another American hero we should remember on this day – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during whose presidency the United States not only saved itself from armed revolutions Left and Right, but literally saved the world from fascism as well.