Open Doors

Twenty-six years ago this October I spent a long half hour under some sort of Caribbean bush with a man about my age. We didn't have much to say. And he couldn't chat much, anyway, being dead.

I didn't know, and never learned, who he was, or how he had come to that lonely little hole, under the roadside bush, to be killed defending his hardscrabble little island from the power and the glory of the United States of America. But there he was. Twenty-something years of diapers and lullabies, stories and tears and hugs, schoolbooks, scoldings, ideas and ideals, love and fear and hate and hope had come down to this; face-down in his scattered effluvia, eventually to be dragged away and tipped into a hole and covered up like trash.

His place at the table forever vacant, his memory slowly fading.I'm here, today, with my wife and my children and my house safe around me. And a lot of that was because of the willingness of my people to fight - in the Revolution, against slavery, against fascism - and, yes, to die.

But I'll bet that if you could have asked him, he probably would have asked for nothing more.And, as always:

"It seems to me that the VERY best thing for the majority of Americans would be to think of this Memorial Day not as time reserved for barbeques and softball in the park, but as the time it took a 19-year-old private to bleed out, alone amid the dying crowd in the grass before the wall at Fredricksburg.The time it took a husband and father to convulse his way into death from typhus in the tent hospital outside Santiago de Cuba.

The time that the battalion runner, a former mill hand from Utica, New York, spent in a shell hole in the Argonne staring at the rest of his life drizzling out of his shattered legs.

The time it took for the jolting trip down the Apennines to the CCP, unfelt by the father of three because of the jagged rip in his gut wall that killed him that morning.

The time required to freeze a high school kid from Corvallis, Oregon, to the parched high ground above the Yalu River.The time it took for the resupply bird to come for the plastic bag that contained what had been a young man from the Bronx who would never see the Walt Frazier he loved play again.

The time taken up by the last day in the life of a professional officer whose fiance' will never understand why she died in a "vehicular accident" in the middle of a street in Taji.

I've been proud to be a soldier, and don't kid myself that there will be a day when the killer ape "studies war no more". But the modern view of war as video entertainment for the masses sickens me. Every single fucking human being needs to have it driven into his or her forehead with a steel nail that every single day in every single war some person dies a stupid, meaningless death that snuffs out the world in a moment. That those empty eyes zipped inside a bag or covered by a bloody blanket were the windows to an entire universe, once.

That the price we pay for forging our national will is paid in the unlived futures of those we kill and those of us who die to make it so.Maybe then we'd be sure of what we want to achieve before we reopen the doors of the Temple of Janus."

Home from the Hill

Just a brief note to mark our return from our second real "family" vacation, a short Memorial Weekend trip over the Cascades to the Bend region of the Oregon High Desert.The kiddos said that of all the things we saw and did they liked the hot tub in the room at the Riverhouse in Bend the best. So much for the grandeur of Nature.But they agreed that the lava cave and the volcano and the hawks and Smith Rocks were the second-most awesomest after that.More later, plus the End of Perfection in the House of Pane.

Were you born in a barn?

Janus was the god of doors.

The two-faced deity was also the god of endings and beginnings, and in the later Republic assumed the role of the overseer of war and peace.Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. 2nd Cent. AD) wrote:

"Janus also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Mark Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time; then war broke out again at once, and it was opened."

Virgil explains the meaning of the ritual closing of the gates:

The terrible iron-constricted Gates of War shall shut; and safe within them shall stay the godless and ghastly Lust of Blood, propped on his pitiless piled armory, and still roaring from gory mouth, but held fast by a hundred chains of bronze knotted behind his back.
[Aeneid, 1.293-296]

In other words: the gates were closed to keep War in.

I know that Memorial Day is supposed to be a "holiday" for "honoring" and recalling our war dead. But, frankly, the dead are dead. As a society the 21st Century United States doesn't do honor or remembrance particularly well. We're not, by and large, a retrospective - or introspective - people. Our fear of death largely prevents us from doing much real thinking about the dead as they are, instead of the fictions and romances we tell ourselves about them.So I find that most Memorial Day "memorial" ceremonies - those not simply an honest excuse to cookout and take a day off work - are poorly-disguised flag-waving exercises, where the zombie dead of past glorious wars are invoked to bless the warfighting of their descendants.The United States has never been a particularly peaceful nation. We have sent our people out to kill and die for us in foreign lands since we tried to invade Canada during the Revolution. As we are now. And just as with our dead, we do little introspection, or rumination, about the whys, the hows, the what-now, and the what-comes-after.

We're perfectly happy to pass by the open doors of the Temple of Janus.

Every year on Memorial Day I post this. But this year I'm tired of repeating what most of us here know and what most of those around us neither know nor care. Instead I humbly suggest that we let the dead bury their dead. And think of the living, and the decisions we make for them and to them.

For through those open doors will walk the dead men we'll "honor" the next last Monday in May, and left outside those doors will be the living bereft to whom they will not return.Whenever I used to walk past the open door my father would bark at me "Close the damn door! Were you born in a barn?"

My father would know what to do about the Temple of Janus.