Where should we look for our memories on Memorial Day? Tradition says that this federal holiday is observed to honor the dead of past wars. But how many wars, going back how far? Should we remember only our own war victims, or all the victims of war in history? Do we need to remember Achilles and Richard III? And how are these multitudes of the dead to be honored? With a generalized sadness, or with the painful specificity of names and dates?
The whole of recorded history has been filled with wars, and we can assume that prehistory was worse. War has been a human occupation – a hobby almost - for thousands of years. Every tribe wants to subdue or wipe out every other tribe; it seems to be in our nature. The most abundant artifacts found on ancient archaeological sites are not necklaces but arrowheads.
So, in every era, as one war followed another, memorials to dead heroes and leaders were created, sometimes in the form or heroic poems and songs, sometimes as physical statues or monuments. These can be impressive: the Giant Barrows or Tumuli from the Neolithic age, the Megalithic Dolmen built out of huge stones, or indeed the pyramids. They provided a highly visible reminder of the glorious past, as long as anyone remembered which glorious past it was. The Romans were very fond of statues of emperors and senators, each one a futile grasp at immortality.
We had almost lost the habit of putting up statues of famous individuals. A stone memorial is too vulnerable to desecration or destruction, unless it is something really big, like a pyramid or Mount Rushmore. The throwing down of statues has become quite fashionable – Confederate generals, slave owners, and even Columbus, who thoughtlessly discovered the Bahamas. Even stone isn’t eternal.
But, as history unwinds backward, a new sculpture park along the Potomac has been announced. It’s hard to guess who will be featured in it, but it will certainly be well-guarded against such vandalism. For overriding ironic reasons, we have also avoided Roman-style triumphal arches until recently.
Most of the heroes and heroines of our time, presidents, billionaires, and YouTube celebrities, may never be immortalized in stone. Instead, they will be remembered, if at all, in a trillion digital images that time will delete as surely as it deleted Ozymandias, the king of kings. Our most impressive monuments in stone are generic memorials like the Vietnam War Memorial, or the Cenotaph in London, that preserve the memory not just of an individual but of the sacrifice of a whole generation, heroes and victims alike. This, in my opinion, is a great improvement, a small step towards honesty.
Now there are once again real wars, and it’s hard to keep up. New history overwrites our old memories. The millions who died in the two World Wars are already halfway to being forgotten. How much memory can we take?
Once-a-year reminders like Memorial Day strike just the right balance. The history teacher in Alan Bennett’s powerful play “The History Boys” explained it to his students like this: “It’s not so much lest we forget, it’s lest we remember.”
