Words and Music of Memorial

May 25, 1980
Port Charlotte
Memorial Day

Words and Music of Memorial

[CJW Note: 114 years ago, 1866; read p. 86, AMERICAN SCRIPTURES]

When I was a boy, Memorial Day was a solemn community celebration. About 9:30 the parade to the cemetery would commence. Still remembered is the twinge, the awe, the excitement, as the parade marshals stepped off:

The military band from some branch of service
The veterans – a few aged men from the Civil War, veterans of the Union Army riding in the large touring automobiles
Veterans of the Spanish-American War, most of them still marching in 1920-21-22
Then the veterans of WWI – most still young, vigorous. But the shaking experience of some memory of amputees being pushed in wheelchairs by buddies.
Then the auxiliaries – DAR, GAR, VFW, AL, .... I have wondered how many then thought of auxiliaries as a put-down.

Then the high school band, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts. At the cemetery there was band music. A prominent citizen recited the Gettysburg Address; a school boy or girl, good in elocution,, would recite Barbara Fritchie or “In Flanders Field the poppies blow.”

Then the mayor or Brig Gen. Sweetser (also a bank president) (wondered about staid Gen. Sweetser leading a charge at Argonne Forest or Chateau Thierry – not knowing then that in war that’s not what Generals do).

There would be much bragging talk about how “we” won the war and made the world safe for democracy.

Jan. 22, 1917 – Wilson’s address to Senate on .... Great Companions – 574

The war did not make the world safe for democracy – Wilson’s dream – a magnanimous peace and a League of Nations to maintain it – was shattered. Political powers at home and abroad saw to that. Wilson’s dream and his health were ruined. The ripe opportunity of the ages for world peace was derided and passed by. The dragon seed of WWII firmly planted in fertile ground.

Some poets and artists sensed the growing shadow -

Trapp p. 157 – Litany of the Lost – Sassoon
R Rdg. # 366 – The Young Dead Soldiers – Archibald MacLeish

But also Memorial Day was a remembrance of family dead, soldiers or not. Before the contagious multiplication of automobile and boat, parents and children’s graves were decorated with flowers and plants – Decoration Day.

When one thinks on it, the hard-working fathers and mothers who ceaselessly labor to rear their children in love and decency – they die for their country, too.

The professor of thanatology, Dr. Jos. Schneidman dedicated his book to his parents in moving words:

....

There are other sacred memories, [holding] in trust sacrificial heroes who did not wear uniforms. Can we soon forget the martyrs of the freedom struggles of the 60s: James Reeb, Goodman, Chaney, Viola Luizzo, Medgar Evers, the little children blown to bits in a Birmingham church, Martin King?

[CJW note: Band 1, Side 2 – Simon & Garfunkel – He Was My Brother. Scheindman, p. 189 – German pastor]

There is another debt we owe to memory – we were a proud nation – conquering the wilderness – driving the native American back, occupying his hunting grounds, exterminating the buffalo, treating the Indian so that many look back on the scene and think, “we were the savages, not they.”

[CJW note: By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept]

When the hopes faded of the American Indian to hold land for hunting they turned to the ritual of chant and dance (songs of hope amid ...). White men called it the Ghost Dance. For the Sioux it was a solemn evocation of the spirits of their ancestors and of the buffalo that had vanished. A crier chants:

“Now those who have looked upon us from the Beautiful Land are coming to see us once more. If you wish to see them once rise and dance.”

“You who have died
The Beautiful Land is giving you back to us.
You will live again
You who have died
“
Now they are walking
“
The buffalo are walking
“
Those who were dead
“
Now they are walking
“
You who have died
We have been taught
to pray with a pipe
So live once again
You who have died
“
“

[CJW note: Music of the Great American West]

This human heritage of ours has many memories: courage, triumph, defeat, glory, humiliation, sacrifice, greed, despair, hope.

[CJW note: Trapp p. 272; John Holmes – Testament
R Rdg 434
naïve – an impossible dream
Children of Lincoln School did not know real world, power politics, natn’l expansion
“Except ye become as little children....
Closing Judy Collins Side I – Band 5]