Memorial Day, 1924

Considering my moniker on this blog, it should come as no surprise that I am a great fan of Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States. Admittedly, for a long time this appeal stemmed from the commendable pithiness of his pronouncements, and the wit he frequently employed in them. As an individual who is rather taciturn and fond of the driest bon mot, I feel an affinity for Silent Cal.

But recently, it is the content and not the style of the man’s public service that has drawn my admiration. Last July 4th in the Wall Street Journal, Leon Kass wrote about Coolidge’s address commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Kass’s piece illuminated the ideas of the 30th president and showed their relevance to our time. He is often written off as the ultimate laissez-faire leader, whose fanatical devotion to small government in a time of excess led to the Great Depression. Surely these critics never read Coolidge’s Independence Day oration, in which the same man who once said “the chief business of the American people is business” warns against a spirit of “pagan materialism,” I wonder if they would understand the message even if they did read it.

Fortunately, Coolidge took the opportunity offered by other national holidays to elucidate his ideal of American society. In 1924, Memorial Day still took place on May 30, the day set aside by the Grand Army of the Republic for decorating the graves of fallen comrades “with the choicest flowers of springtime.” That Memorial Day, the 30th president spoke to a crowd at Arlington National Cemetery on “Freedom and Its Obligations.” Coolidge began his address by rooting the day they observed in its historical context. Memorial Day arose as a way to pay tribute to the dead of the Civil War, so the president recounted the issues that led to the separation of the states and the conflict that ensured. Instead of limiting his discourse to the specifics of the Civil War, however, Coolidge recognized the larger questions that drove the conflict and survived to his day, and ours: “How can the Government govern and the people be free? How can organized society make and enforce laws and the individual remain independent?” Coolidge noted that even when individuals could be absolved of any responsibilities, they would naturally infringe on the rights of others, betraying their very independence. The solution, the president argues, is membership in a community, and deference to its best interests:

When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship.

A Saturday Morning Odyssey

Before beginning our tale, permit me a confession and a caveat.

Confession: I am not entirely sure what the point of this essay is. In its genesis, I had a clear thesis in my mind, one which will be revealed in due course. However, events themselves upturned my ideas and left me muddled and confused, rather more so than usual. So I will leave you to draw a message from my story, because I cannot come up with one, except perhaps the great moral truth that “people are weird.” But we hardly need another addition to the literary canon to drive that point home.

Caveat: What follows occurred in that twenty-first century Twilight Zone dotting the suburbia in our broad land – the Wal-Mart. Last night I finished rereading The Great Gatsby, in which F. Scott Fitzgerald considers the Dutch sailors first laying eyes on the New World as “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” In the light of this morning’s events, I’m not so sure. Were old F. Scott with us now, I’m sure if he decided to drag Zelda up to West Egg’s Wal-Mart at 2am to grab a frozen pizza, his capacity for wonder would be heavily taxed.

Anyway, to our tale. A Saturday morning, a week after graduation, nothing to do at the moment (the time between graduating and grad school seems to be a Twilight Zone all its own). A local store offers a sale on custom framing. My mother urges me to get my diploma framed now, so it can sit in my bedroom, still the bedroom of my childhood, and silently mock me for having nowhere suitable to place it without feeling pretentious. Seeing the logic in her proposal, I agree, and we go up to the mall, decide upon the diploma’s framing future, and leave it to its fate.

Mom treats shopping on Saturdays as I imagine Eisenhower treated the Normandy invasion: aware of the dangers and obstacles (in Mom’s case, other drivers and long lines; in Ike’s case, German fortifications and troop reserves), familiar with savagery of the enemy (fellow shoppers; Nazis), planning for the worst (parking on the frontiers of the lot; 20,000 dead), having to deal with a stubborn and uncooperative ally (me; the French). She thus draws up a battle plan while expecting resistance in force. This morning, our Orders of the Day call for us, after dropping off the diploma, to stop at the nearby Wal-Mart and pick up a few items for a Memorial Day barbecue. Reluctantly, I agree to this plan of attack.

For a long time, I bristled at criticisms of Wal-Mart as a display of humanity at its worst. This denial grew out of my distance from an authentic Wal-Mart experience. During high school and summers home from college, the time I was most likely to show up at the place was in the middle of the night with friends on the hunt for snacks. True, there were a few oddballs in Wal-Mart then (besides those of us strangely drawn to the place in the middle of the night like some sort of oasis in the desert), but that made complete sense considering the hours. Surely the vast majority of shoppers during normal hours were perfectly sensible soccer moms interested in bargains. This illusion came crashing down last summer, when I visited Wal-Mart during normal business hours for literally the first time in years. The wailing children, the yelling parents, the strange outfits, the bizarre bulk purchases . . . the horror . . . the horror . . .

So no, I do not particularly want to accompany my mother to the super-size Slough of Despond. But the heat of the day is ghastly, so waiting awkwardly in the sweltering car in the farthest reaches of the parking lot somehow seems less appealing. I steel myself and go in, determining to make the most of the opportunity as Mom picks up her items. A recent discussion with a friend revealed to me my disgrace in not seeing the classic John Wayne film The Searchers. Today shall be the day I start to rectify this error. Uneasily, hesitantly, I move to the back of the store, where electronics are kept. Passing the food aisle, I hear a mother berating some sort of father figure on leaving their child unattended in the cart in the next aisle. Keep your head down, I tell myself, walk fast, no eye contact with anyone. Proceed past the women’s clothing section – everyone, man and woman, has to pass by such sections at some point, but the awkwardness never lessens. Destination in sight . . . arrived in electronics. Safety, at least temporarily.

I feel sure that I’ve seen The Searchers before on one of the discount racks, and it doesn’t take long to vindicate my sense. Seven dollars. Success! I snatch the DVD case and walk around the shelf towards the register.

And there, behind the register . . . ugh. A face I haven’t seen since graduating on that sunny June night almost four years ago, perhaps then seen with a sense of satisfaction that I’d never have to see it again in my life – the face of Timmy Wilson (the name has been changed to protect the guilty). Timmy was unanimously agreed to be one of the most obnoxious kids in our high school class, a distinction consented to by many who themselves vied for it. A tiny child, who if he surpassed the height of five feet, did it just barely. What he lacked in physical presence he made up for in shrill, annoying vocal presence. If you were to hear his voice, you would marvel at how perfectly it seemed to match his appearance – an ear-shreddingly high-pitched yet somehow raspy tone, which he would use to make insults outdone by elementary school kids and ask questions answered on Sesame Street. I think of the class I most distinctly remember having together with him, World Cultures in eleventh grade, where his obnoxiousness was on full display, mitigated only by the fact that the teacher basically gave the rest of the class free rein to tell him to shut up. Thoughts of some of the better retorts bring a smile to my face – but it disappears quickly, because his face, once forgotten, is right there, and it obstructs my path to owning The Searchers.

What exactly is he doing? He is in front of the computer, crouched down and looking up at the screen, his hand on the mouse. Timmy rocks back and forth on his feet, a look of panic on his face. He looks terrified, as if he accidentally pressed a button that ignited a self-destruct sequence of this very Wal-Mart, and nobody had yet noticed their impending doom. In short, he looks just as I would expect him to in the real world – completely out of his depth, totally incompetent, utterly overwhelmed.

I look at the copy of The Searchers in my hand, a movie considered by many to be the greatest Western of all time. I look at Timmy, the only employee at the register, who in his evident panic hasn’t noticed me. I look at The Searchers, containing the finest performance of John Wayne’s storied career. I look at Timmy, still completely absorbed in whatever bad news the computer screen brings. The Searchers . . . Timmy . . . The Searchers . . . Timmy . . .

I look for a final time at the DVD in my hand, slowly turn around, walk back to the shelf that had contained it, and replace The Searchers on the rack.

Slouching even more than normal in despair at my complete and utter defeat by Timmy Wilson, the kid who quite possibly graduated at the very bottom of our high school class and doesn’t look to have risen since, I shuffle to the front of the store to meet Mom, who only needed a few things for the barbecue. Fortunately she is also making her way to the front of the store. I meet her and we get in the express line.

Oh, wait. A new incident looms on the horizon, although not at the crisis level. I happen to know this cashier as well. Really, she’s a nice girl, one who graduated a year before me, but I haven’t seen her since then, and I hadn't talked to her all that much before anyway. We’re Facebook friends, like that means anything, and I’m pretty sure she’s had a kid in the intervening years. This is just going to be awkward. One of us will ask, “So, how have you been?” The answer will be a simple “Fine” and uncomfortable silence, or the truth and uncomfortable details. It’s not like my story is that great, either. I went to college. Now I’m back. Didn’t I get “Most Likely to Succeed” as a senior superlative? My conception of success at the time entailed me never coming back to Springdale again. So already, fresh out of college, I’m a failure. And then there’s the fact that my mom is right there, and she’ll make some comments in her standard chipper manner, and that will only heighten the discomfort . . . ugh. This could be pretty bad, too.

Unexpectedly, my mother becomes the instrument of my immediate salvation. As I search desperately for a plausible escape, she puts her few items in the bag she brought in and asks me to replace the shopping basket at the front of the store, where I can wait for her as she goes through the line. With pleasure! I take the basket and do as instructed. Then I go by the door and wait. There is still another patron in front of Mom, so I will have to pass a few more moments, but that’s going to be easy. I will stand here and put on my sunglasses to further mask my identity and my approachability if identified. But, as I stand straight up, hands behind my back, scanning the store with a faint sneer to drive home that I would be quite unpleasant to talk to, I feel relief. There is no one in sight anymore whom I know or recognize. Almost there.

Mom gets through the line and starts walking toward me. Yes! I take a step forward.

“So, Georgetown? What’s your connection?”

A man comes up towards me, looks to be in his fifties, wearing khaki shorts and a striped polo shirt, pointing at my shirt emblazoned with the name and seal of my alma mater. Is this a fellow Hoya? An individual who, bearing the same credentials as me, must surely be above all this around us, a figure of reason and reasonableness who, like me, has been cruelly ordained by the Fates to spend precious minutes of his life in such a hellhole?

I tell the man that I graduated last Saturday, to which I get a “Hoya Saxa!” Whaddya know? He, too, is a Georgetown graduate, and he asks my major. I tell him History and Government.

“So you want to work for the Evil Empire?” he remarks pleasantly. A fellow Hoya and a fellow skeptic of big government! I mention that I could see myself going back to DC for a few years, although it’s no place to spend an entire life.

“I spent eighteen years of my life in DC. It’s an evil town.”

A bit strong, but honestly not much, if at all, stronger than the rhetoric of some recently-departed Republican presidential candidates.

The man, still pleasantly, takes out his wallet and removes a dollar bill. “Let me show you what I mean. See this dollar bill? Just a typical old dollar bill, not like the Monopoly money they print nowadays. Did you ever look at the seal on the back?”

Rather perplexed at this turn of events, I stutter something about being familiar with the seal.

“Now why would a free republic have a pyramid on its seal?” I attempt to look interested, but my mind goes to a History Channel documentary I once wasted a Fourth of July with, “Secrets of the Founding Fathers,” which absurdly but at least hilariously explained away the very existence of the United States as a conspiracy of the Freemasons. Great, I think, so I’m dealing with a guy who’s watched National Treasure once too often.

“Look above it. Why would a free republic have an ‘all-seeing eye’ on their Great Seal?” The man puts the dollar bill in my hands and urges me to discover for myself these truths he has worked out. Now I just start mumbling things like “I don’t know” and “That’s interesting,” when I do know that somewhere between the Hilltop and Harmarville this guy lost his marbles and that this stuff, in fact, is not interesting.

“See the motto?” the man asks, pointing to Annuit Coeptis. “Can you read Latin?” I attempt a crack about how I wish I did, so I could read my diploma, but he’ll mix no levity with his deathly serious purposes. “It says, ‘Our undertaking is favored.’ Whose undertaking? This is from four years of Latin at Georgetown.” Hoya Saxa, indeed.

He shifts attention to the other side of the seal on the bill while I slowly shift towards the door, where my mother awaits. “Look at the stars above the eagle. Do you notice anything about them?”

Actually, I do see now. He’s not anti-Masonic, just anti-Semitic. Couldn’t I have just run into a Nicolas Cage wannabe? I’m pretty sure his character is supposed to be a Georgetown grad anyway. Things would have been so much simpler.

“It’s in the shape of a hexagon, a Star of David. Why would there be a Star of David on our seal?” We walk out the door and he builds to the conclusion. “The seal of the United States has been changed only once in our history, in 1932. There’s a reason for that. Do you know what the biggest lobbying group in our country is, besides the National Rifle Association and AARP? The Israeli lobby. They’re the ones pulling the strings.” I have no idea how the year 1932 is connected with AIPAC, unless they were responsible for installing Franklin Roosevelt as an Israeli Manchurian candidate before there was an Israel. Which would be an impressive achievement to pull off and then keep under wraps, coming from the same group which apparently put all of their plans on the back of our most common currency. Perhaps they didn’t account for the possibility of taking four years of Latin at Georgetown.

I make clear that I am going now. The man, who has maintained a pleasant, if increasingly intense, demeanor throughout, shakes my hand and wishes me the best. And so our dialogue, inquiring after truth in a western Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, ends, and the twenty-first century Socrates walks off into the midday sun.

Heading to the car, I meet my mom, who clearly had no idea what was going on and asks if I knew the man from somewhere.

“Nope. He was just another Georgetown graduate who saw my shirt and made the connection.”

“Oh, how nice.”

On the Local Economy and The Hunger Games

Katniss Everdeen: Local(ist) Hero

The comments presented forthwith do not necessarily represent the opinions of the author, nor any reasonable human being. On the other hand, inspired by this meisterwerk (subtitle: "A Critique of Pure Treason"), this essay may be a product of a voice of some generation at some point whose collective tongue cannot be extracted from its collective cheek. The author also posts here with less silly (but still somewhat silly) thoughts.

Wendell would live in District 11

The world of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games could be cited as the frightening result of Tocquevillian democratic despotism. The Capitol, bent only on rapid materialism and consumption, is lulled into abandoning their mores and is oblivious to questions of the morality of pitting 24 adolescents against each other in a fight to the death as long as they are entertained. Katniss and Peeta, the flawed heroes of our tale, are bent on bucking the system, refusing to be a “pawn in their Games” and eventually becoming the symbols of resistance for the impoverished Districts who have become artificially dependent on the Capitol’s kindness for their very existence. Besides their growing role as reluctant leaders in the resistance against the evil President Snow, Peeta and especially Katniss show fierce loyalty to their home, District 12. In this essay, I will examine how themes of localism pervade Collins’ kid lit series and the “total economy” of Panem is a means of destroying the local character of the Districts.