Memorial Day Notes

We are up visiting friends in the Northwest corner of Connecticut for Memorial Day.  Yesterday was one of those rare brilliant days suffused with robust sun, mild breezes, glittering greens, and heady scents. At dawn, the thermometer read a brisk 47, but by late morning it was into the 70s.  I went to visit another friend up the street who with his wife is an avid collector of contemporary art and who maintains a swank private exhibition space. From time to time, they organize shows drawn from their collection and invite sundry friends and acquaintances for an afternoon of art and conviviality. The next of these jamborees is scheduled for a couple weeks hence, but as I was here now I was given an advance look around. 

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My taste in art differs markedly from that of my friends, but the overall tenor of their latest assembly is quite remarkable, indeed moving.  The inspiration for the exhibition is a letter from 1942, written in German, and addressed to “Lidi Sara Israel.”  It was from the Nazi government occupying Luxembourg announcing “for the record” in echt Deutsch fashion the seizure and confiscation of her possessions. Thanks for the heads up!

The woman in question happened to be my friend’s mother. Hers was a story with a happy ending. Many others were not so fortunate. A copy of the Nazis’ courtesy notification occupies a quiet spot in the first room of the exhibition. Other objects include various WWII recruitment and propaganda posters, a skeletal representation, built to scale, of the Fat Man atomic bomb by Robert Morris, and a lithograph by Sigmar Polke of the infamous Nazi exhibition of Entartete Kunst—they organized one final showing of “degenerate art” before consigning  Kandinsky,  Max Beckmann, Klee, Mondrian, and all the rest to Nazi oblivion. There are other haunting pictures from the WWII section of the exhibition, including a terrifying  painting by the Norwegian artist Vebjorn Sand depicting a celebratory, glasses-raised moment at the conclusion  of the Wannsee Conference in 1942.  The raucous group of senior apparatchiks had something to celebrate.  They had just organized the administration of a huge and logistically complex government undertaking, the extermination of European Jewry. Sand’s painting, appropriately, is called Corpses I.

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The exhibition is a sort of illustrated autobiography: signal world events from World War II, through the civil rights movement in the U.S., to 9/11 and its longaftermath. I am not at all sure my friends intended the exhibition to accompany the little town’s  Memorial Day festivities, but  it offered a thoughtful introduction. It was the usual thing.  Brief fly-over by — I think — F16s), parade with vintage cars,  trucks, and tractors, interspersed with veterans, boy scouts, local police and firemen, etc.  The best-decorated bike of boy and girl were awarded commemorative coin sets, and former Senator James L. Buckley delivered a brief address which, unlike most such effusions, was much more than a congeries of clichés. Buckley was not afraid to speak of, and praise, American exceptionalism, an idea that has been in bad odor among the beautiful people at least since Barack Obama took office and told us that he believe in American exceptionalism in the same sense that a Greek would believe in Greek exceptionalism, a Brit in British exceptionalism, etc.  We may leave aside the tantalizing suggestion that Obama has been doing everything possible to make America exceptional in the Greek sense. In fact, as Buckley noted, America emerged form the Second World War as the most powerful, prosperous, generous, and free  country the world has ever seen.

Is it still? Buckley forbore to say. But he went on to cite Tocqueville and others on some of the qualities that distinguish America from other countries.  He ended with the famous exchange between Benjamin Franklin and the curious lady who accosted him after the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  The proceedings had been conducted in great secrecy. “What sort of government have you given us, Mr. Franklin?”  “A republic, madam,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

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It is worth thinking about that “if.” Meanwhile, our former paper of record has weighed in with its usual perspicacity this Memorial Day weekend. I hardly ever see the dead-tree version of the New York Times and it’s one of the entertainments of my visits to the Northwest corner to catch up with this species of ghastliness incarnate. It never disappoints. The ever feyer Sunday Magazine features a long piece on Greece and its Marxist Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis by Suzy Hansen. Suzy, the Times  informs us, actually went to Greece in 2010.  Doubtless she has gotten outside a Greek salad or two as well. “Varoufakis’s wife,” she writes in a typical sentence, “ invited me over one evening to their apartment near the Acropolis.” There follows much description of the apartment and its appointments. To describe the piece as “drivel” would be unfair to “drivel,” but the Times endeavored to redeem itself this morning on Memorial Day itself.  The featured picture on the front page is of a toddler and dog and the caption directs us to a story about a bill in Albany to allow our canine friends in restaurants.  You know the joke headline: “World ends, women and minorities hardest hit.”  The Times  is almost there.  “Despite Gains, Women in War Battle to Fit In,” one headline tells us; “Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard,” reads another. And then there is the op-ed page. The aptly named Charles M. Blow offers this meditation on the significance of Memorial Day. “In a way, Memorial Day may be a time for us to consider the evolution of this day: a day established by a disadvantaged population to honor war heroes who now belong to a military whose members are increasingly being drawn from a disadvanged population.” Mr. Blow concludes by inviting us to “think about that between the barbecue and beers.” OK. But you might wish also to think about whether there is any subject which he cannot twist to feature his racialist obsessions.

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