Are You Dog-Faced or Downright Hang-Dog for Memorial Day?

This afternoon after she had posted her war meditation, Favorite Daughter remembered a very funny (because it's so realistic!) Barbara Hamby poem, "St. Barbara of the Dog Bite" and read it out loud to me, doing all the accents and voices in a pitched chortle.
You won't be able to hear it as I did, too bad for you! -- but it's from Hamby's Delirium collection if you can find yourself a copy, and here's a taste:

. . .Twisty the apricot toy
poodle of the hotel concierge
fastens her tiny satanic teeth to my ankle. I shake her off,
and she skids across the polished floor of the lobby
and thumps her little cranium on the wall.
"Pauvre Twisty, le pauvre petit," everyone whimpers
while I drag my leg behind me to the elevator.
Then in Arles a mutt tries to jump from a moving car
to savage me. . .
I admit I'm superstitious but I think this bears closer
scrutiny. . .

posted over at Cocking A Snook:

I’m not up to depressed and demoralized yet. I’m still at pissed off.

I am angry with what passes for Democratic leadership and frustrated that all we seem to have in this area this weekend is a bunch of flag waving “we love the troops” crap.

Where’s a good peace march when you need one!

Nance

There's not that much to give away, and if I don't check out soon, there may not be that much. But the bank made me do it. As happens, the bank changed hands and this time they do not want to be my executor. The attorney suggested I asked friends. I love my friends and feared they would turn on me if they knew they'd have to clear out this ratpack's nest. However, I asked and they said they'd be honored. So I invited the two (one is alternative) Near Sixties to lunch to let them know how much it means to me. One friend drove me to the restaurant in a red convertible (Ford) and the other home (also red but GM). They hugged each other before I could introduce them and then proceeded to check out medical insurance options, pre-Medicare. From there to children, past marriages and a good sprinkling of what's wrong with Bush, at which time I got to talk a little. I feel so loved.
Also there is real responsibility. This weekend I've spent time clearing out old records and tomorrow morning my teenage buddy is coming to put stuff on the top cupboard shelves where I will never have to think of using them again. Already I have been relieved of a stuffed chair I wished I hadn't brought to the apartment and one nice colander. If lucky, maybe the mother of my buddy will take the oversized crock pot.
Well, I just wanted to let you know that I am anxious to get busier on important things. This afternoon one blogge, not on CK, outlined the direct line between Jerry Falwell's satanic ways and the state of the nation. And another did a reasonably good job of convincing us that Bush was a psychopath. I felt so mellow and wrote what I thought would be comforting replies. It wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't listened to an hour's conversation between Bill Moyers and Maxine Hong Kingston regarding her work with disturbed returning veterans. She's a joy to listen to.
And that's the way I did the weekend, except of course I had to watch the memorial program live from the Capitol.
I'm sure you are having a good weekend. About the dog! Who knows?

Sounds like you are in good humor too.

Favorite Daughter is not insensitive to death, of course. I didn't mean to leave that impression. But the closest she has come to it personally has to do with love, not war. She wrote (and cried and laughed) after her beloved dance teacher died in December.

And then blogged, natch.
"For life's not a paragraph and death, I think, is no parenthesis":

Jules showed up after awhile, we all cried ourselves out until we were completely dehydrated, then we started laughing. Because that is what you have to do. . .

It is a confusing "holiday." There are the people who died after a full life and are celebrated for having spent a part of their youth fighting a good fight. And there are the people who died during that good fight. They are honored. And there are the people who are dead and will be dead because of the current stupidity. They are honored. But the war itself is an evil that should not have been imposed on them and their families. And that colors the acts of honoring.

We hung the flag at half-mast this morning. After I mended it -- no rain but the wind tears everything up. And that's fine. We mean to honor the fallen and the rest who serve. But we hope that our neighbors do not mistake our flag for any show of support for this President or his obscene behavior.

And, yes, we are doing all the other things that need to be done. Yes, I know it's hard to not enjoy a sunny day of BBQing or a night out with friends. My errands need to be run like everyone else's. My kids have the sleepover tonight. Brownies must be baked! I want them to enjoy this day and every other day. I don't want them to know, really know, first hand, about death through war. Or love, for that matter. But that happens. We grieve. We grow.

But to have it thrust upon us for no good or natural reason. . . that's what has me continuing to be angry. The dying is not over. The life-altering injuries have not stopped. The families and this country are still being damaged by this insane war. And for absolutely no good, or even understandable or somehow comforting, reason.

I'm glad we're all having a good Memorial Day. Underneath it all though, and not so underneath, I am angry.

Nance

Nance, I've been completely out of the national news and commentary loop lately so I don't have any idea -- are nine-eleven victims included in this memorializing of war dead too, or are deaths of non-warriors in warfare (at home or abroad) in some other memorial category?

An hour of entertainment seems like short changing those who die. Victim of war, accident (natural and manmade), combatant, "non-combatant in a war zone," and more. Who gets the gold stars when a soldier's widow loses a child to poverty after the father's death? There are many ripple effects from war fatalities, regardless of whether the war was just. I personally do not ascribe to the "just war" theme.

In WWII, the real travesty was in a bungled conclusion to WWI. Was Viet Nam started because the Korean War is still not settled? We have Iraq I and Iraq II. And this is just reference to conflicts since the mother of our battles in the US. I'm reading the second volume of Branch Taylor's King-years series. Even in erudite venues like CK, there are those who are defining and pontificating over the "race issue." And some are defining holocaust. Darfur, Hitler's Germany, Tamil Tigers, whoever. There's a lot of memorializing to think about.

Last night at the Capitol the tone was quite different from the previous few years. In the past, living military played a bigger part. This time there was a chance to recognize the living wounded, the newly killed, and families whose lives have changed. Two ways of looking at this. Sober acknowledgment of war's high cost, or a propaganda ploy to allow Congress to accept more wars. Take your pick. I am so anti-war that I have studied it all my life. At this moment in Taylor I'm reading how LBJ twists arms to get the voting rights bill and Great Society legislation. To those who maybe weren't even born in 64, LBJ was known as the fellow who sent so many to their graves for no good reason.

It keeps me at the keyboard, hoping some of the young will realize they cannot conquer such a useless endeavor by ignoring reality. Studying war is bigger than politics, religion and patriotism. When citizens make their religion their politics, or their politics their religion, we are headed for a shallow nationalism which makes flagwaving pass for loyalty and memorials pass for human understanding.