{"id":1672,"date":"2015-05-25T10:16:42","date_gmt":"2015-05-25T14:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1672"},"modified":"2015-05-25T10:20:37","modified_gmt":"2015-05-25T14:20:37","slug":"memorial-day-post-for-my-grandmother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1672","title":{"rendered":"Memorial Day Post, for my Grandmother"},"content":{"rendered":"

Readers who followed my Facebook page following the end of my marriage may recall I was determined to learn the mandolin. \u00a0High Strung in Durham<\/a> rented me a beautiful mandolin, and I proceeded to admire it, trying to play a few chords. \u00a0My daughters asked I do this on the porch, because the sounds I made were jangled, discordant \u2013 not at all like the Bill Monroe tapes my dad played on car trips. \u00a0After taking one lesson from an impatient teacher, I tried to learn online. \u00a0When I told my mom the reason I was not going to give up, she explained something to me. \u00a0I had been determined to play the mandolin because my grandfather had played the mandolin at home with his four brothers. \u00a0I had told myself a story that he had also played the mandolin after he returned from war. \u00a0I had told myself a story that he played the mandolin to heal from the trauma of war. \u00a0My mom, his daughter-in-law, explained to me that I had this wrong. \u00a0My grandfather could not play the mandolin after he returned from war. \u00a0Some wounds of trauma do not fully \u201cheal\u201d in the way that many people think about \u201chealing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The false stories families tell themselves about war can be harmless, I suppose, but some lies are poison. \u00a0In a documentary on the phenomenon that was \u201cPat Tillman,\u201d<\/a> \u00a0his mother fights the U.S. Defense Department to uncover the truth about how her son was killed. \u00a0Pat Tillman\u2019s youngest brother Richard broke up the fake-story piety of a national, televised memorial service for Pat, naming that Pat himself was not Christian and would have been offended by the use of his death to mix together American patriotism and divine providence. \u00a0(Richard\u2019s words were more direct than that pretty sentence. \u00a0Watch the documentary.) \u00a0In a scene that must shape Memorial Day, Tillman\u2019s mother tries to sort through why two of her sons had enlisted in the military after 9\/11. \u00a0The Wikipedia site about the documentary above names that the film \u201cstars\u201d Pat Tillman, but his mother, Mary Spalding, is the unrelenting truth-seeker in this story. \u00a0She wonders, on film, whether the fact that she had framed photos of other men in her family in their military uniforms had shaped her sons\u2019 imaginations to consider war imaginable. \u00a0She wonders whether she had subtly made war a matter of heroism. \u00a0While watching her words, what a viewer cannot escape is, even if this brave woman had not displayed the images of family warriors in her home, her sons might have still been swept up by the collective lie that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. \u00a0To tell your sons and daughters a different story, in the last fourteen years, has required an almost impossible thirst for truth combined with a willingness to endure the derision of other Christians.<\/p>\n

My grandfather was drafted into World War II while my father and his sister were small children. \u00a0My grandmother, Ethel Mae Elliston Hall, had watched her own father die slowly from the trauma of World War I. \u00a0In my family, no one could reliably make either of the two great wars seem glorious. \u00a0One of my uncles by marriage has tried to do that, for his own complicated, personal reasons. \u00a0But no one else in the family can stand the effort. \u00a0War had taken a father away from my grandmother. \u00a0\u00a0War had taken a husband away from my grandmother. My grandfather had returned from WW II, and he was a beloved and deeply respected member of his community and of his extended family. \u00a0But there was no mistaking that he suffered the rest of his life from being shot up nearly to death in the \u201cWar in the Pacific\u201d \u2013 itself an unbearably discordant set of words. \u00a0During my first year teaching at Duke, I heard some younger divinity students say that World War II was justified because the U.S. had entered in order to end the Holocaust. \u00a0I have taught about the lies of war in every class since. \u00a0I have done this in part to honor the memory of my grandfather. \u00a0I have done this in part to honor the truth that my grandmother lived her entire life.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons that you will hear the phrase \u201cthe ultimate sacrifice\u201d again and again and again each Memorial Day (not just from Fox News, but from MSNBC and maybe even Democracy Now) is that the words \u201cultimate\u201d and \u201csacrifice\u201d work on some part of the mainstream American psyche. \u00a0I am still trying to sort out why those words are so salient. \u00a0But I think it has something to do with what Susan Ketchin has called our \u201cChrist-haunted landscape.\u201d \u00a0What Ketchin describes about the South applies in different ways across the United States. \u00a0Something about the origin stories many mainstream Americans tell ourselves involves men making the \u201cultimate sacrifice,\u201d perhaps to try to prove to ourselves that the ghost of Christianity is true, now, in a different way \u2013 the way of righteous warriors. \u00a0What breaks my heart and pisses me off as a Christian is that the real, risen Jesus Christ is the hope for real confession, the hope that allows my friends and family to see the lies of war for what they are. \u00a0By replacing Jesus Christ with veterans, we not only commit heresy, we also commit a heresy that takes away the very truth that makes it possible to look at the truth of human lies. \u00a0If part of what fuels Memorial Day is the desperate hope that no one solider has died for \u201cnothing,\u201d then perhaps it is vital for Christians to relearn that the meaning of our lives and of our deaths \u2013 all our lives and all our deaths \u2013 is not held in a story of national meaning. \u00a0Our lives and our deaths are created and recreated out of nothing<\/i>. \u00a0Our very creation and our re-creation are created out of the no-thing that is God\u2019s grace.<\/p>\n

This is the faith that has allowed me to pursue the different patterns of lies that people have told in order to justify war in the United States. \u00a0For the sake of future work, I now here bookmark some of the mainstream journalists and scholars who have risked ticking people off by reporting on real memories and the danger of false memories about war in the U.S. \u00a0\u00a0I could bookmark radical truth-tellers, but, for the sake of congeniality, I am marking here ones that are more easily discussed around the picnic table next Memorial Day. \u00a0I hope you find them useful. \u00a0God Bless.<\/p>\n

Naomi Wolf on Zero Dark Thirty<\/i> and pro-torture propaganda:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2013\/jan\/04\/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty<\/a><\/p>\n

The American History Guys on the \u201cethics\u201d of warfare:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/backstoryradio.org\/shows\/rules-of-engagement-3\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Brooke Gladstone and James Fallows on evading the hardest question about the war in Iraq:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.onthemedia.org\/story\/wrong-hypothetical-question\/<\/a><\/p>\n

The American History Guys on tidying up stories of war:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/backstoryradio.org\/shows\/mission-accomplished\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Bob Garfield and Mark Benjamin on the censoring of footage of dead soldiers returning from war:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.onthemedia.org\/story\/131321-the-true-cost-of-war\/transcript\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Bob Garfield and Ted Gup on torture and Hollywood:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.onthemedia.org\/story\/263564-cias-double-standard-secrecy\/transcript\/<\/a><\/p>\n

The American History Guys on stories about veterans coming home:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/backstoryradio.org\/shows\/coming-home\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Brian Horne on nostalgia and the Cold War:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.onthemedia.org\/story\/266327-warm-feelings-cold-war\/<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Readers who followed my Facebook page following the end of my marriage may recall I was determined to learn the mandolin. \u00a0High Strung in Durham rented me a beautiful mandolin, and I proceeded to admire it, trying to play a few chords. \u00a0My daughters asked I do this on the porch, because the sounds I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,10,101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-ethics","category-theology-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-qY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1672"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1675,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions\/1675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}