peace memorial?

it is what it is...

this past weekend as part of my continuing series of mental health outings on the fringes of life in central virginia, my wanderings took me to the virginia war memorial.

our past governor, tim "the killer" kaine, presided over a major expansion of the facility as a way of acknowledging the commonwealth's absolute dependence on the military culture that has absorbed and transfixed the citizenry. without war, the old dominion would be but a shadow of its current, blood-lusting, tea-swilling self. we may hate the government and negroes in the white house, but we just can't get enough of that federal moolah when it comes to "defense".

of course, the embodiment of the war-loving patriot among virginian's is our own paul galanti. galanti was one of those brave aviator,s like the inimitable john mccain, who dumped B52-loads of bombs on the gooks during the late unpleasantness in vietnam. in return for his largesse, he was shot down and imprisoned by his erstwhile targets, and by all accounts treated quite shabbily.

of course, carpet bombing population centers from out of the blue isn't exactly a neighborly how-do-you-do, so i'm not exactly sure what he expected... to be treated according to the quaint, outdated geneva conventions?

forgot. that's our game.

anyway, galanti came back and was treated as befits a hero who gave more for his country than the rest of the armchair patriots who swear at the TV whenever a liberal or a negro appears on the screen. so we'll give him that. and now, he even has the visitors center at the war memorial named in his honor.

if all you've ever heard is how exceptional your own country is, and how undeserving those whose politics and interests run athwart ours are deserving of a little legroom on the planet, i guess it's no great surprise to consider imperial conquest to be next to godliness. kill 'em all, and let the deity sort 'em out!

i had a thought, however, as i surveyed the grounds at the memorial (i really wasn't up to going inside). these days, we've got war, war and more war. it seems sometimes that we're even at war with the idea of not being at war. it's vicious.

since we've got wall-to-wall hostilities going on, and that's more the rule than the exception any more, why don't we just flip the script and memorialize what we don't have very much any longer: peace?

correct me if i'm wrong, but you memorialize something when it's receding from you in time and memory, so you don't forget it. we can memorialize world war I or WWII, for example, or the holocaust, because we don't want to forget the people who sacrificed.

since we're at war all the time these days, it's not like anybody's going to forget about that. every day, on page 3 or page 4 of the newspaper, there's another story about how we're winning the latest war, or opening a new front or coming up with some new, gee-whiz weapons system that costs plenty.

peace, on the other hand, was something that everyone wants, and the bible talks about it all the time. we even wish for "peace on earth" at xmas. ronald reagan always talked about peace through strength, and we've spent untold trillions of dollars on a down payment on peace -- but it just seems to always be tantalizingly out of reach, no matter what.

so instead of memorializing war, we ought to spend a few million bucks and memorialize peace for a second. it should be an uncontroversial gesture in favor of something that, at least on paper, everyone is in favor of.

besides, we're always looking for a way to monetize things that previously didn't have a pecuniary value. by creating a peace memorial, our beleaguered political jurisdictions could potentially create a new tourist attraction, and kick up a little economic dust.