Empty Exercises in Remembering

Arlington National Cemetery, located just beyond the Lincoln Memorial and right across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., is a curious place, with its share of anomalies. It was originally dedicated to the Union dead, yet it is on the site of an estate where, through marriage, Robert E. Lee lived and only left with the outbreak of the Civil War. And that section of Virginia once was a part of the District of Columbia, which was formed from swampy areas of Maryland and Virginia, because it was close to George Washington's digs at Mt. Vernon, till, well before the Civil War, Virginia took back its part, which was no great loss to D.C. except that on maps it looks as if its once perfect diamond shape has had a large part of its southwest corner ungraciously chewed away by rats.

Although my father left behind several interesting photos taken at that cemetery in the 1920's or '30's, by the time I became old enough to check out Washington's numerous sights on my own, I automatcially excluded cemeteries from my do-it-yourself enrichment program. This applied especially to Arlington, with its acres and acres of crosses that all look just alike and are precisely placed the same distances apart in row after row, and thus even in death the servicemen are denied their individuality, just as they were, as much as possible, during their miliary careers. If people feel that there's something about them that makes them special -- and what person doesn't -- being consigned to that eternal uniformity makes the prestige of being interred in Arlington hard to understand.


The Arlington National Cemetery Amphitheater, about 80 years ago. ^^^

On the Memorial Day just past, in his capacity as the President of all the United States, B. Obama did go across the river, during which, among other observances, he also sent a wreath to be laid on a memorial that is not often mentioned as being at Arlington, because in a Union burial place that memorial is dedicated to the Confederate dead of the Civil War. This particular wreath-laying had been done by all the Presidents going back to Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson was the one who had that memorial placed there, in 1914, just short of 50 years after Lee's surrender in Appomattox, a county directly adjoining the one in which I've lived ever since I left D.C.

On the same day B. Obama did something else, something that he is the firstr President to do. He also had a wreath placed at a memorial dedicated to the 200,000 Rainbow ("black") men who served in the Union Army. (Oddly, in the last moments of the Civil War, Lee, desperate for troops because his own forces had been decimated as much by desertions as by anything else, earnestly urged that Rainbows also be conscripted into the Confederate army, but he was roundly voted down.)

That memorial must have been erected after I left D.C. circa 1980, because I don't recall ever hearing anything about it. But then quite a few memorials to various groups have been put up and laid down in Washington since then, and finding room for them must be a problem. The most desirable sites are on the National Mall, which is not a hugeness of stores haunted by wandering teenagers and dazed, elderly bench sitters but instead is an elongated open space stretching from the U.S. Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, and it features a big wading area a few inches deep called the Reflecting Pool. Or at least it used to. But can the Mall still be called an open area, and is the Reflecting Pool even there anymore, what with all the new structures dedicated to the departed?

Washington, D.C., my hometown, is, in its capacity as the country's Memorial City, and in its capacity as the seat of the U.S. Government, and as a place of longtime refuge for the slaves and their descendants, is a city full of questions but noticeably short on satisfying answers. (Note: After the Civil War a "Freedmen's Village was established on part of the estate in Arlington, to serve as a home for ex-slaves, but in 1882 the U.S. government, finally deciding to get serious about using the land for another purpose, "removed" the village's living inhabitants, but let the dead ones stay.)

One of those questions is, should B. Obama, as a Rainbow or a so-called "black man," have been required to honor the Confederate war dead, when those men fought so hard to preserve the right of Euro people to hold Rainbow people in abject slavery, and thus to murder, rape, beat, torture, sell, work without pay, hunt them down like dogs for trying to escape, and mistreat and endlessly humiliate them in all the other ways, bar none, that humans had found up to that point to make life unbearable for other humans?

From here the answer is a resounding "No!" Especially when it is noted that those Confederates took a special interest in butchering surrendered Rainbow soldiers with added zest whenever they were able, especially at Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi, and at the Crater, in Fredericksburg.

It is akin to the situation that would exist in Germany if it had a large minority of Jews, and one had gotten to be the Chancellor, had not the German government contrived during World War 2 to wipe Germany and large parts of Europe, too, as devoid of Jews as they possibly could. Would this unlikely Jewish Cnancellor have laid a wreath in honor of the SS? Would he have been expected to? Well, I guess this analogy is clouded, when we note that a Lousianian of Jewish ancestry, Judah P. Benjamin, was the Confederacy's Secretary of the Treasury.

Yet the Fox Neo-Nazi News (FNN) was happy to see B. Obama doing his "duty," while saying, with satisfaction, that "the Left" was not happy about it. This shows how, lacking any sense of proportion and decency, ideologs like FNN never take into consideration the essential decency or indecency of anything. Instead they automatically divide everything into "Left" and "Right," like teams in a schoolyard, with those views, people, policies, etc. less favored by them being dumped on the "Left".

So does this mean, once the long line of Euro Presidents is restored, that they will, following the example of President Obama, also send wreaths to honor the Rainbow Union soldiers every Memorial Day? We can expect that to be quietly forgotten, with the argument that where would we be if every President was expected to make a special point of honoring people of his own ethnic origins? Fallen servicemen of many minorities, especially the smaller ones, would have to wait a very long time.

The special ancestry of B. Obama, however, probably made that wreath-sending easier for him to do than it would've been if, as with the majority of Rainbow people in this country, slavery had been a factor in his family history. But slavery and its seemingly indelible legacies did not come embedded in his blood and bones, because he had a Euro mother and a Kenyan father, and, despite his physical appearance, he can only have feelings of that highly painful experience that he got second-hand from his acquaintances and his mentors. And that was lucky for him, because, in spite of all the totally transparent and ridiculous attempts to deny it, the resentments of slavery and all its aftermaths are still so strong that he could not otherwise have been elected President, at least in the present era.

Meanwhile the memorial anomalies go on and on.

At the Confederacy's capital, Richmond, Virginia, just 100 miles east of here, there is the secessionist equivalent of Arlington, a big cemetery to which, however, the difference in eras lent the weird incongruity of being named "Hollywood," and in which a great many Confederates were interred, primarily from the numerous blood-soaked Virgnia campaigns, in which the horrors of trench warfare and sniper fire were perfected in anticipation of worse wars to come.

Is there a memorial to the Union dead at the Hollywood Cemetery or in any other cemetery of Confederate soldiers anywhere else in the South? From all the attitudes that I've heard about the answer is, "Not very likely."

At the time that Wilson had that memorial put up at Arlington, he and many others hailed it as a sign of the conciliation that had been made between the warring forces of the U.S. Civil War. Yet at the same moment he and his wife were instrumental in having regulations installed that institutionalzed racial discrimination in the U.S. Civil Service. And I am sure that, as in the cases of many others, this blighted to a certain extent the lives of my mother and father, after they had finished their schooling and had wasted no time in fleeing to D.C. with such great hopes for a better life than anything they could have expected in the New Orleans of 1916.

Conciliation for some, but the same remnants of past injustice meted out to the same targets remained, and still do -- and so have the wars and tooling up for wars, despite all memorials everywhere.

A view of the National Mall, taken from the top of the Washington Monument, about 80 or more years ago. This looks out over the Lincoln Memorial and then the Potomac, with the Arlington Cemetery not far beyond. The rows of structures to the right or north of the Mall were probably temporary buildings left over from World War 1 and have long since been replaced by numerous museums, memorials, tourists, street vendors, and Homeland Securers.
/d