New World Notes - The Slippery Slope of Memorial Day

This week on New World Notes: radio program #221, May 29, from 12:00 to 12:30 p.m., host Kenneth Dowst re-broadcasts some anti-war, anti-militarism perspectives on Memorial Day.

Kenneth Dowst offers this description:

The program features journalist Robert Fisk's antiwar reflections (there's no "Good War"--not after 1945--he concludes). Plus Howard Zinn's 1976 newspaper column on whom Memorial Day ought to honor (which got him fired from the Boston Globe)... plus commentary by me and Steppenwolf's classic antiwar song, "Monster."

After recording this installment in 2009, I sent an email "fan letter" to Howard Zinn expressing my admiration for his Memorial Day essay, which I read aloud in the installment.

An old English major, I decribed the essay enough to show that I understood how it works. I thought its framing device was especially clever. The essay begins and ends by discussing highway smashups--an American Memorial Day tradition. But by the end, smashup doesn't mean just vehicular carnage. It becomes a metaphor for (you might say) the collision of American values, ethics, and government policy. A metaphor for where American militarism is leading us.

I told him that the essay was my favorite, of the many Zinn essays I had read. That's still true.

Within two hours, the eminent historian had written and sent me a gracious personal reply. He thanked me for my kind remarks and told me that, in fact, the Memorial Day essay was one of his favorites too.

He died, four months after our exchange, in January 2010.

Howard Zinn's essay, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"--and much other good stuff--is reprinted in The Zinn Reader (Seven Stories Press, 1997).