Remembering The Color Red (repost from 2005)
[Today is Memorial Day, and there is much to remember, and much for which to be grateful. Today is a Thanksgiving Day of sorts, a day of gratitude for heroism, strategic genius, strength, and even death. Not senseless death, not ruthless genius, not heroism based on lies; but the noblest acts of the human spirit, which always manifest themselves in risk and sacrifice.]
You've seen the American flag, thousands of times, or perhaps too many times to count. It's arguably a gaudy piece of fabric, like so many strips of cloth pasted together, with staid geometry. It's the sort of thing a child might make, and hardly the kind of thing one would expect of an artist. Picasso would not come up with such a design, nor would Pollack or Warhol or Wyeth. It's a child's creation, it seems, deliberate and direct. A stick figure of simple ideas.
What are those ideas? Thirteen stripes for thirteen colonies; fifty stars of fifty states floating in a blue field of vigilance, perseverance and justice; white for purity and innocence, red for hardiness and courage.
It's all pretty simple.
But the dominating color of the flag is not justice blue or innocent white; it is the hardy, courageous red, the red of bloodshed, of bloody knuckles, barked shins, and bulleted bodies. It is the red of bellicosity, of fighting heartily and hardily, with courage and pride, for what is blue and white, for the pure and innocent; the vigilant and the just.
It is only sensible that red dominates, as this country is built on the blood of others -- countless, mostly faceless and nameless others -- who fought and died for ideals we are free to mock and rebuke in legal and social safety, if we choose. We are free to live because others freely died; their loss being our gain, and therefore their gain as well.
Any living thing on this planet stands in and is rooted in death, in the bloodshed and battles of life. The giant pines outside my windows grip the earth in their sinewy, rooty grasp, rooted in the life-giving death and decay which is soil. There is no escaping the fact that everything alive is alive because of countless deaths, countless invisible battles for survival. America's ideals stand tall quietly sipping the blood of the buried ages past.
So the flag is red, blood red, and there is no white purity or blue vigilance without that bold, primary color.
Currently, blood, American military blood, is dripping in desert sand in a far-away land. It is being bound and mopped up in pure white gauze with blue vigilance, but it is dripping nonetheless. What comfort is there to the dead and wounded if we, as many Americans do, tell them that we support them as heroes yet the reason for their heroism is stupid or a lie or illegal? What meaning does it give an amputee or quadriplegic or blind soldier, to tell him (or her) that, though honored for losing some part of his life, he did so for deception? What sense is there in such paradox - that a man is a hero for doing the immoral or false thing?
"Oh, I support the troops, I just don't support the war."
It's not unlike telling your child you support his interest in playing baseball, but you just don't support the game. You find the game stupid, immoral, illegal, dishonest -- but -- you support his participation. Yes, you just love your daughter's interest in the cello, you just think the cello and Beethoven and Bach are all lies and abuses of power.
One wonders how such parents can cheer at baseball games, or applaud at the end of cello recitals. Most parenting experts would consider such duplicity bad parenting, sending out the double-binds of mixed messages. It would be considered, undoubtedly, by astute therapists, to even be a form of child abuse.
Consider, though, this possibility to frame an allegedly unjust war. Consider that our soldiers were sent in to battle as antibodies are sent into fight infection; or that they are sent in as scalpels to remove a malignancy. And what if they discover there is no infection or malignancy? Would the doctors who sent them in be considered fools, primarily when all the evidence, and even the patient, point to a considerable problem? Would it all be for naught if the reasons were empty and vain?
No, for the precise reason that when the scalpels opened the patient's body, and the antibodies coursed through her veins, other tumors were discovered and removed, and other infections subdued. Doctors could then be heard telling their patient afterwards, "Well, the scans showed a tumor on your liver and an abscess on your bladder, but when we opened you up, we discovered our mistake: You had a malignancy on your stomach and an abscess on your spleen."
For sure countless folks might be tempted to yell out, "Liars! Cheats! Surgery-mongers! You went in on false pretenses. You fudged the MRI data, you fixed the diagnostics around preconceived ideas!" But they'd be fools.
Today remember what it is that makes protest possible, and what it is that makes Thanksgiving necessary. It's Memorial Day. Remember.
Remember that it is a red day for a reason. And, lest we forget, let us remember too that all the states were red in the very beginning.
Peace.
©2009/Contratimes. All rights reserved.
You've seen the American flag, thousands of times, or perhaps too many times to count. It's arguably a gaudy piece of fabric, like so many strips of cloth pasted together, with staid geometry. It's the sort of thing a child might make, and hardly the kind of thing one would expect of an artist. Picasso would not come up with such a design, nor would Pollack or Warhol or Wyeth. It's a child's creation, it seems, deliberate and direct. A stick figure of simple ideas.
What are those ideas? Thirteen stripes for thirteen colonies; fifty stars of fifty states floating in a blue field of vigilance, perseverance and justice; white for purity and innocence, red for hardiness and courage.
It's all pretty simple.
But the dominating color of the flag is not justice blue or innocent white; it is the hardy, courageous red, the red of bloodshed, of bloody knuckles, barked shins, and bulleted bodies. It is the red of bellicosity, of fighting heartily and hardily, with courage and pride, for what is blue and white, for the pure and innocent; the vigilant and the just.
It is only sensible that red dominates, as this country is built on the blood of others -- countless, mostly faceless and nameless others -- who fought and died for ideals we are free to mock and rebuke in legal and social safety, if we choose. We are free to live because others freely died; their loss being our gain, and therefore their gain as well.
Any living thing on this planet stands in and is rooted in death, in the bloodshed and battles of life. The giant pines outside my windows grip the earth in their sinewy, rooty grasp, rooted in the life-giving death and decay which is soil. There is no escaping the fact that everything alive is alive because of countless deaths, countless invisible battles for survival. America's ideals stand tall quietly sipping the blood of the buried ages past.
So the flag is red, blood red, and there is no white purity or blue vigilance without that bold, primary color.
Currently, blood, American military blood, is dripping in desert sand in a far-away land. It is being bound and mopped up in pure white gauze with blue vigilance, but it is dripping nonetheless. What comfort is there to the dead and wounded if we, as many Americans do, tell them that we support them as heroes yet the reason for their heroism is stupid or a lie or illegal? What meaning does it give an amputee or quadriplegic or blind soldier, to tell him (or her) that, though honored for losing some part of his life, he did so for deception? What sense is there in such paradox - that a man is a hero for doing the immoral or false thing?
"Oh, I support the troops, I just don't support the war."
It's not unlike telling your child you support his interest in playing baseball, but you just don't support the game. You find the game stupid, immoral, illegal, dishonest -- but -- you support his participation. Yes, you just love your daughter's interest in the cello, you just think the cello and Beethoven and Bach are all lies and abuses of power.
One wonders how such parents can cheer at baseball games, or applaud at the end of cello recitals. Most parenting experts would consider such duplicity bad parenting, sending out the double-binds of mixed messages. It would be considered, undoubtedly, by astute therapists, to even be a form of child abuse.
Consider, though, this possibility to frame an allegedly unjust war. Consider that our soldiers were sent in to battle as antibodies are sent into fight infection; or that they are sent in as scalpels to remove a malignancy. And what if they discover there is no infection or malignancy? Would the doctors who sent them in be considered fools, primarily when all the evidence, and even the patient, point to a considerable problem? Would it all be for naught if the reasons were empty and vain?
No, for the precise reason that when the scalpels opened the patient's body, and the antibodies coursed through her veins, other tumors were discovered and removed, and other infections subdued. Doctors could then be heard telling their patient afterwards, "Well, the scans showed a tumor on your liver and an abscess on your bladder, but when we opened you up, we discovered our mistake: You had a malignancy on your stomach and an abscess on your spleen."
For sure countless folks might be tempted to yell out, "Liars! Cheats! Surgery-mongers! You went in on false pretenses. You fudged the MRI data, you fixed the diagnostics around preconceived ideas!" But they'd be fools.
Today remember what it is that makes protest possible, and what it is that makes Thanksgiving necessary. It's Memorial Day. Remember.
Remember that it is a red day for a reason. And, lest we forget, let us remember too that all the states were red in the very beginning.
Peace.
©2009/Contratimes. All rights reserved.
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