The winter blues has got me bad, Mama
The Column: 01.22.24
Winter can hit a person hard and when we drop down to zero and below and the wind is out of the north, I walk the deserted streets, no sign of civilization, just blinking red lights, and come home and see in the window the reflection of a wreck of a man, and I think, “Nobody knows you when it’s ten below. I am old and I am tired and my credit cards are all expired. Got no friends who I can call, and the doctor says, No alcohol.”
I walked into a nice restaurant in Minneapolis last week, full of people drinking novelty cocktails and eating expensive food, and the music coming out of the ceiling was all metallic percussion and persistent repetitive unmusical phrases, it was like eating dinner in a machine shop, and I felt like all of American culture is headed toward trash and corruption. And then you read the poll that shows that one-fourth of all Americans believe that the FBI was responsible for the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, and you think the stupidification of America is maybe a conspiracy of foreign-born otolaryngologists who examine the larynx by threading a thin scope up your nostril and what’s to prevent them from injecting a dumbing drug into your brain? You go to their office suffering from sinus problems and you come out believing that electric dishwashers cause erectile dysfunction.
And then I went South to get some warmth and while there I had a brilliant idea, my first in a long time. It’s a doable task that will make our beloved country a more cheerful place.
The South is littered with memorial battlefields, state parks and memorials and the federal acreage — 4,600 acres at Chancellorsville, 9,500 acres at Chickamauga, 5,000 at Manassas, 2,500 at Vicksburg, rows of rusting cannon, and then the monstrosity that is Gettysburg, a 6,000-acre junkyard of obsolescent obelisks and meaningless mind-numbing monuments and sentimental statuary, a National Park of Bad Art, so cluttered it’s hard to walk through and imagine the ferocious battle that took place. Very few people under the age of 60 care about the war it commemorates, and the junk should all be trucked away to a landfill and the land developed into nice neighborhoods with hiking trails and flower gardens and finally put Pickett’s Charge and the Lost Cause behind us and go on to more interesting things. You want a memorial, put up a podium on the spot where Abe Lincoln gave his speech and let visitors press PLAY and listen to it.
This is our inheritance from the weepy Victorians, plus the vast graveyards in Queens and Brooklyn with thousands of stone angels that you pass on your way to the airport and never see a single soul except the caretakers. It’s so sad: the wasted space devoted to mummification, the toxicity of embalming fluids, the memorializing of the ordinary where instead children should be playing games and riding their bikes.
We need to commemorate heroic acts of invention and creativity that have improved our lives vastly over those of our ancestors. I see that Microsoft has a little museum at its campus in Redmond, WA, and there are various rock and roll museums. I’ve googled around for a museum celebrating the first successful open-heart surgical operation, which took place at the University of Minnesota in 1952, a great technological feat that has extended the lives of millions, including me, and I don’t find it.
Is there a Google museum somewhere? There’s a Motown Museum in Detroit but it sounds like more of a gift shop than museum. Muddy Waters’s old house in Chicago is now a museum, which is good, but more needs to be done. You set aside 6,000 acres in Pennsylvania to preserve the high-water mark of the wretched Confederacy — why not take that land and create a park devoted to the music of Black people who made the world dance and gave it soul? Nobody knows you when you’re down and out. Everybody needs someone to love. So rock me, mama, rock me. And I’ll fly away, O glory.
Where Lee had his ass whipped, let’s make an amphitheater and every day a crowd gather and sing, “Let’s go down to the river and pray, studying about that good old way, and who shall wear the starry crown? Good Lord, show me the way.” O sister, let’s go down to the river and pray.” And now I’m going in and get warm.
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You do realize that Gettysburg was a Union victory, right? And it marked the beginning of the downfall of the Confederacy?
Granted, I am over 60 now, but Gettysburg has greatly updated their programs and exhibits. Did you know that the lead from the bullets used during the battle killed almost every tree on the battlefield? How both armies pulled out and left the villagers of Gettysburg to deal with the dead...humans, animals, etc....in a day before there really was heavy equipment to do the excavation.
More than anything, I think Gettysburg illustrates the tremendous cost of war as does Antietam.
I live near New Market, Virginia. The boys from Virginia Military Institute (VMI) strode up the road to meet their destiny and join the Great War. It rained. The plowed fields were so muddy that it sucked the shoes and boots off the soldiers as they worked their way across the field in withering fire. I believe eight of those boys (they were 15 and 16) died; one lingered for over a week. The family on whose farm a lot of the battle was fought crouched in their basement during the barrage of artillery.
As Americans, that was the last war fought on American soil. We have no connection with the suffering in Ukraine and little connection with that in the Middle East. The battlefield parks explain some of that.
And you can ride a bicycle through them, walk them, picnic on them. To eliminate them would be to erase part of our history.
One cannot help growing older but turning into a grumpy, old man, Garrison, remains your option.
Were it not for the Union soldiers from your home state of Minnesota on Cemetery Ridge on July 2, 1863, Lee might well have turned his eventual defeat into victory at Gettysburg and gone on to win the war. Have you no respect for the sacrifices made by others that have enabled people like you and me to live in this beautiful country?
Please refrain from future cynical, self-absorbed columns on the possibilities of desecrating Arlington National Cemetery and Omaha Beach. To paraphrase Joseph Welch, "Let us not assassinate these lads further, Garrison, you have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"