What to remember, what to memorialize, who to thank, and for what, including the making of war?

Xan rightly spends time trying to imagine the unimaginable agony of civilian victims of a military atrocity; read it here and weep.

In this war, we can be grateful that attempts to portray dissidents about war policy as undermining our troops, unAmerican, and desirous of an American defeat haven’t worked.

Why so many on the right are so determined to believe that fully half of Americans are traitors is the real mystery, (although Kevin Baker’s article on the June issue of Harper’s Magazines, “Stab In The Back” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, and more than worthy of the price of the magazines, which also features Art Speigelman on those Danish cartoons).

We aren’t traitors. We care deeply about our military, what happens to it, how it behaves, for what uses and causes it is employed.

What I usually do on Memorial day is to re-read Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d;” Yes, that Wal Whitman - a more-or-less openly Gay man, who spent the Civil War years in service to the wounded: You can find a copy of it here.

Even on Memorial Day, cannot we also remember to what terrible ends even a “good war” can take us?  Read more