Page 28 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • May 26, 2010 Westerns where the bad guy gets slugged in a man-to-man fistfight and accidentally falls on his own knife. Some said Americans mutilated dead and dying Japanese to get their gold teeth. I know people who said this happened; they just didn’t say so on a flag-draped reviewing stand. Japanese-American Relocation and the fact that most African-Americans were kept out of combat, even when they volunteered, were covered along with the contributions of female nurses and ferry pilots, too often overlooked. The result was sweeping and honest – and sometimes deplored because it was objective. The confusion between flag-waving and history has led to the present problem of how to celebrate Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veterans Day. Honest political leaders are in a quandary: How can they honor the courage and sacrifice of the honorable men and women who served without seeming to endorse some actions that many people find repugnant and some wars which have obviously become a fiscal and moral liability? How do you support the troops in Iraq without implying that you wholeheartedly support the war in Iraq? How do you challenge the right of people who love America and respect our soldiers to ask why they’re really there and how much longer they have to stay? Burns and Ward took a lot of abuse for “The War.” People who served courageously and honorably, or those whose relatives served, would undoubtedly prefer to believe that the good-guy bad-guy ethos was clear-cut in every war Americans every fought. Check out “The Imperial Cruise” about the Philippine Insurrection -- that every single American was pure and noble, and that every German or Japanese killed in an air raid was a death-camp guard or a Nanking rapist, but it just isn’t so. Most of them were women and children who didn’t get to vote on what the murderous thugs in charge of their countries decided to do to people. Mass bombing of civilian women and children once had a simple definition under international law: murder. Real men can usually take the truth. Most will admit there were horrors on both sides, more theirs than ours, and not get into endless justification. I’ve met very few combat veterans who thought World War I was a good thing, and I’ve dealt extensively with authentic human beings from both constituencies. My uncle Paul – not a biological uncle, but my father’s Prussian landlord and surrogate uncle – was a sniper in World War I. He logged 200 hits in World War I on the Western Front, mostly against the French. Later he was transferred to Salonika, a fiasco where French and the Germans spent so much time in fixed positions that they actually got together to swap newspapers and ration items. In short, they knew they shared a common humanity. He never got over it. Once he realized the Frenchmen he killed were patriots drawn into a European conflict they didn’t want any more than he did, he turned to alcohol. A few days after Pearl Harbor, the Franco-American police chief showed up to demand that he hand over the sniper rifle that had killed more than 200 Frenchman. The World War I sniper remained otherwise unmolested, but on nights when the moon was full, the police chief would bang off a few rounds against the water tower in the next town. Wary residents picked up the spent slugs. Nobody, in those days, argued with a police chief – especially when he was a veteran of World War I. Memorial Day, when all is said and done, was organized to honor those brave young men who died in battle or due to disease, so the United States could be rid of the disease of chattel slavery. Chattel slavery was an awful idea. It was a national cancer and it was unjustified by any moral or rational understanding of humanity. On the other hand, the young Americans who believed they did the right thing when they enlisted – or more often, were drafted – to oppose Kaiser Wilhelm II, a constitutional monarch who had Jews in his cabinet, certainly deserve our respect, but their cause was somewhat more dubious. Adolf Hitler was an evil and perverse man, but had had no territorial designs on the United States. Hirohito was a timid, creepy little man turned evil by cowardice, but Hirohito also had no intention to take over America. The generals and admirals in his cabinet, many of them trained in Britain, France, and Germany, knew that could not happen. United States Cabinet officials, some of them communists, had to pull a lot of strings to get us into World War II. Most Americans – about 80 percent of them circa most polls in 1940 – flatly were not interested in dying for problems in Europe or China, and they were right. Outright diplomatic bungling by some of the same people led to U.S. involvement in the Korean War. Our involvement in Vietnam was fraudulent – the Gulf of Tonkin attack was a fake -- though opposition to communism was not a bad idea because communism itself is a very bad idea. We went into Iraq looking foe “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist, and the guy who said they did exist later turned up dead. We should question the wars and the waste of good American lives even as we continue to honor those who served. Let us honor them with remembrance and prayer. Let us also honor the memory of all the American dead of all our wars by suggesting that sending brave young American men and women outside our own quadrant of the hemisphere to fight for corporate or foreign interests is not what George Washington had in mind when he enjoined us to avoid entangling alliances. How do we celebrate Memorial Day this year? We celebrate by honoring those who had the courage to serve their nation in time of war and lost their young lives because of that courage – and, in the early days of the Republic, won the freedom we all cherish because they put their country’s future ahead of their own immediate well-being. That is how people become heroes. No country can survive unless some people are willing to stick their necks out for the country’s protection. Memorial Day started in the aftermath of the Civil War, when casualties from battle and disease were so enormous that, for most of a generation, most people outside the professional officer corps wished they could forget the whole thing. The officers who came from good families or had first-rate minds went back home after 1865 and continued to work for the economic assimilation of the black people they had helped to emancipate into the American mainstream. They were thwarted by self-serving politicians of their own generation and the whole thing had to be done over again 100 years later. The huge number of soldiers killed during the Civil War includes Americans who were native-born, German, Irish, African-American, French, and Italian. They put their lives on the line to rid America and the world of the horrible anachronism of chattel slavery as it developed due to colonialism, and they won the respect of the world for their courage and their idealism. Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward won wide acclaim when they told this story in “The Civil War.” Using only vintage photographs and art, without the convenience of vast reenactments, they showed what the Civil War was all about. When they tried the same approach to World War II in “The War,” they ran into a maelstrom of flak. Americans broke and ran at Kasserine Pass? My father, who volunteered right after Pearl Harbor, talked to some of the survivors of Kasserine Pass, and trust me, they told him that it happened. When the survivors saw a Stuka attack bomber in a propaganda film, they ran out of the Army movie theater screaming. Who can blame them? I can’t. My father, who spoke German and marginal Italian, later talked to German POWs who claimed the Statue of Liberty had been blown up. He told them that this was a Nazi lie. He also mentioned Kasserine Pass. They also confirmed that it happened. Then they entertained doubts about the purported destruction of the Statue of Liberty. Burns and Ward reported that Americans shot German prisoners in cold blood. I’ve spoken to decorated U.S. heroes of Normandy who saw it happen, and were horrified. Steven Spielberg had the integrity to show this happening in a couple of scenes of “Saving Private Ryan” and the film was a huge hit, honored by those who served because it showed the horror of an assault landing and gave civilians some idea of what kind of courage it took to make one. Burns and Ward recounted many stories of loyalty and valor. They also recounted a handful of American atrocities along with the evidence of more widespread Axis atrocities. They caught a lot of grief for it. In the sort of entertainment most Americans enjoy – war movies are sort of like those B Memorial Day as it should be Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: In your article on Ridgewood’s municipal election results, you lead by speculating whether the vote was a referendum on Graydon Pool as “some observers said” and, if so, the result was a 3-2 affirmation of the existing lake-like pool. A closer look at the results debunks this analysis. The determining factor in this election was clearly opposition to Valley Hospital‘s expansion. Quite simply, Coghlan-Walsh received more votes than anyone else because of her anti-Valley position. Check the results of Districts 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16. These districts include everything east of Northern Parkway and the Ho-Ho-Kus Brook, all the way to the Paramus border and north of Ridgewood Avenue, to the Ho-Ho-Kus border. District 14 is the area east of Route 17, whose residents are concerned about the drastically increased traffic the expansion would bring. In those districts, the final tally between Coghlan-Walsh and third place Cronk (the closest loser) was 809-279, about 75 percent to 25 percent, compared to 57 percent to 40 percent overall. The village wide margin of victory was 618 votes. Those five districts alone supplied a 530 vote margin. That’s 30 percent of the total vote accounting for 85 percent of the margin! I doubt Graydon was the driving force behind this area’s landslide. Nowhere else in the village did we see margins even approaching this. Yes, Coghlan-Walsh voiced opposition to both the Graydon and Valley “renewals” and I suspect the anti-Valley sentiment dovetailed well with anti-Graydon thinking, but outside of the Valley area districts, the vote was essentially even. There was no such ambiguity with the Valley influenced vote: Three out of every four voters Writer interprets election results in those districts went for the only outspoken anti-Valley expansion candidate, propelling her to top vote getter. This salient point was overlooked in your analysis. What these numbers tell me is the Valley hierarchy should not delude themselves into thinking the residents of Ridgewood support their far flung plan. While the opposition is concentrated within those five districts, it is not isolated, and no plausible electoral math can offset their overwhelming numbers. Clearly, a referendum on the issue would not turn out well for Valley. Our planning board members, who will ultimately decide what happens at the intersection of Linwood and Van Dien, and any elected official who hopes to be re-elected would do well to take careful note of these numbers. 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