By Edwin Cooney
Back in the mid 1950s, Charlie Feathers and Stan Kesler wrote a song that young Elvis Presley sang on his way to fame and fortune. (By the way, “Fame and Fortune” was one of the first two songs Elvis sang in 1960 right after getting out of the army!) The song I'm referring to by Feathers and Kesler was called "I Forgot to Remember to Forget." Of course, the song was about his sweetheart (whoever she was), but since the event I referred to above, at least twice a year I'm reminded to remember the sacrifices of the soldiers who gave their health and their lives to keep us free. By the way, I have no quarrel over the money, medical benefits, or educational opportunities our political leadership insists we spend on the veterans that we, in many cases, coerced into military service. As far as I'm concerned, we owe it to them many times over. However, seldom do our presidents, whether named Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Obama, Trump or Biden, address the scourge of war that brought about their fame and, in many cases, their tragic misfortunes.
The president who came closest to addressing the roots of war was Jimmy Carter, the president too many Americans for a time came close to enjoy viewing with contempt. After all, is Jimmy Carter remembered more for the word malaise, a word he never used, or is he remembered more for the war with Panama which he avoided? (Fortunately, that time seems to have permanently passed!)
Since the founding of America, which abolished almost every aspect of royalty or feudalism (the system our European ancestors used to glorify and permanently sanctify those they sent to war by granting them earlships, dukedoms, and large tracts of land), nobility has been replaced with a brand of heroism that offers popularity and perhaps political prominence. Memorial Day was instituted in 1868 through an organization that was called "The Grand Army of the Republic." President Andrew Johnson wasn't its Commander-in-Chief because although members of the military were urged to join it and did so, it was separate from the Armed Forces of the United States. It was designed to see to it that Union soldiers got the benefits northerners believed they were entitled to. At its head was John A. Logan, then a Republican Senator from Illinois. Senator Logan rode his prominence nearly to the top of the greasy pole of American politics. Two years before his 1886 death, he was Senator James G. Blaine's Republican vice presidential candidate.
Too often we're legitimately urged to pause from our beer, parades, picnics, and baseball games to remember why we're celebrating Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, but practically no one seems to adequately recognize that at the root of a soldier's very existence dwells the flower of human failure. That failure is even worse than economic or fiscal failure because it primarily costs lives or worsens innocent lives! Here’s another irony: politicians are always ready to label opposition political ideologies as failures but they seldom view wars or near wars as a failure of government!
Ask yourself the causes of every war we celebrate. Can you bring to mind the primary causes of those wars? Even if you grant that the Revolutionary War was about “taxation without representation,” remember that English voters didn't get adequate representation domestically until 1832, 51 years after Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown.
The War of 1812 insured the expansion of the country, but it resulted in the Civil War as did the Mexican War.
World War I was supposed to make the world “safe for democracy,” but democracy wasn't what Queen Victoria's grandson Willie (the German Kaiser) was capable of grasping.
Sadly, you couldn't convince Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or Hideki Tojo that democracy was at all useful!
Was Hồ Chí Minh, North Vietnam's president, a criminal or a patriot to his fellow Vietnamese?
Saddam Hussein was a self-centered, ambitious, and totally unworthy jerk. Whose life in your family or mine was he worth trading for, regardless of what George Bush or James Baker advocated?
Finally, I assert that even when war is necessary, it constitutes utter failure no matter how much we love and admire the president who leads us thither!
Remember Memorial Day and the Fourth of July if you must, but don't forget that failure, rather than glory, is its father!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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