This is Your Country

This is Your Country
By David Glenn Cox (author)

Memorial Day weekend is upon us; it is a holiday whose meaning has become lost. It was originally known as Decoration Day to remember America's ever-growing numbers of war dead. They were good enough to serve this country and good enough to die for this country, so, by God, they should be good enough to live in it as well.

My father told me stories about returning from WW2 and enrolling at Ohio State University and how quickly he and other vets went from being called war heroes to being called ruffians. National magazines asked, “Will returning GIs ruin the college experience?” The college experience that they were referring to was the experience of privilege. They worried that an Army dogface or Navy pilot might ruin little Biff's and Margie’s experience by forcing them to coexist with those dirty people named Joe and Frank. It had nothing to do with college; it had to do with class privilege.

My uncle Pete joined the Army in 1941 and spent the next four years fighting his way across the Pacific. He once told me that “College was pretty easy after you spend four years living in a muddy hole in the jungle with people trying to kill you.” My father called them the kids; there were vets and kids at Ohio State and the vets had no desire to play grab ass or join fraternities. They were men who had faced death and were interested in building a new life. They were men who were there for an education because they’d already had their experience.

In Nantucket this year the locals are putting out the unwelcome sign. Enclave to some of America’s wealthiest families, where the average home costs almost two million dollars, the island draws $162 million in tourist revenue annually. “It’s not that the people who come to Nantucket are bad people,” said Michael Kopko, one of the town’s five selectmen. “Too many of them are just trashed. They are publicly intoxicated, urinating in bushes and vomiting downtown.”

I read that and asked my son, “What causes public urination?”

“Not enough restrooms.”

I’ve been to three-day rock festivals, blues festivals, city festivals, keg parties and New Orleans, and I’m here to tell you that public urination is the fault of town’s selectmen.

“Last year’s event generated so much public drinking that residents said this weekend they wouldn’t allow their youngsters to follow the custom of wearing their Little League uniforms downtown and soliciting donations," Kopko said.

What time of day were you thinking of sending the future little Ted Williams into the crowd to solicit donations? There is an undercurrent of elitism there that smacks of classism. They want your money, they just don’t want those dirty people on their island.

“We can’t tolerate that kind of behavior,” Kopko said. “If it’s illegal, we have to arrest people. If it’s ugly, we have to peer-pressure people.”

On Saturday there is a boat race known as the Figawi, from Hyannis, and afterwards there is a party. A private party where alcohol is served and bands play music for 800 to 900 admitted guests. “The 800 to 900 people admitted are usually matched by crowds of drunken hangers-on who roam the cobblestone streets," said Patricia Pierce, who owns Pierce Galleries on South Water Street.

Excuse me? “Crowds of drunken hangers-on?” Those cobblestone streets are public property, are they not? How, pray tell, do you discern who is a party guest and who is a drunken hanger-on? While it’s all right and perfectly acceptable for people on the guest list to get trashed, those hangers-on should be arrested and jailed?

“Three years ago, a man entered her shop and demanded that she let him use the bathroom or he would go on the carpeting. She vowed never again to stay open on a race night and risk having drunks come in. 'You don’t want them poking a hole through a million-dollar painting,' Pierce said."

An art gallery open on a national holiday weekend in a town filled with revelers, what’s the word I’m looking for here… Stupid? She made her point though, “You don’t want them.”

"Them" being people who eat hotdogs with mustard on them instead of brats with Grey Poupon. People that don’t own two-million-dollar homes, people who, for the most part, just want a weekend of relaxation. People willing to put down their hard earned coin to do so.

“Nantucket is sliding from a reputation for the casual elegance of lawn parties and cocktail soirees toward a more brutish, frat-party atmosphere," Pierce said.

I once lived in a town with strict blues laws; Sunday sales of alcohol were strictly forbidden. Except that private clubs like country clubs could openly sell to their members on Sundays, the rest of us were constrained to follow the law. The net affect was that I knew a man named Jack who operated a curb market and made most of his money by selling beer out the back door on Sundays. We were criminals while the country club members were just exercising their rights as club members.

We always felt safe buying from Jack because that was where the policemen bought their beer on Sunday, too.

You dirty, smelly people in your Nissans and Fords are spoiling the class privilege experience on Nantucket. You’re good enough to buy their products and sleep in their hotels and pay their taxes for them, but if you step out of line, well then, you will need to be reminded of your place.

This elitism is a feature that New England is famous for, but it’s no different on the Gulf Coast where private beach signs adorn condo properties. Move along now, don’t make me call the law. It makes it indeed ironic that as oil plumes close in on Gulf beaches Barack Obama tells us to come visit, paraphrasing George Bush’s famous advice to go shopping after 9/11.

We need your money to mitigate the damages caused by a multi-national oil conglomerate. We want you to make things look normal so people won’t notice the incompetence and arrogance that allowed the drilling in the first place. This isn’t a case of saying "I told you so," but of saying you should have known better all along. But you put your faith in the oil companies and their executives who are invited to exclusive parties on Nantucket.

They are the kind of people who shop for million-dollar paintings at exclusive art galleries, who are always welcome to use the restroom. They don’t eat hotdogs; they eat lobsters and steaks and measure their vacations in weeks rather than days. Oh, but we’re good enough when you need your plumbing fixed or to call when hooligans are urinating on the rose bushes because Porta-Johns are so unsightly.

We can fight your wars and die if need be to protect this country, but after that the elites would prefer if you would just stay out of their world. But it’s our world, too, and our country and maybe if we ran it for the benefit of all the people who live in it there wouldn’t be so many oil spills and wars.

"The world is filled with people who are no longer needed. And who try to make slaves of all of us. And they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare. And without their music and ideological miscarriages to compare our songs of freedom to, we'd not have any opposite to compare music with --- and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never know its speed, its power...." Woody Guthrie

Thanks for the thread, David.

It was killer to open the front page the other day and see your name in that top spot.

That did my heart good to see that, and to see so many reading what I consider mandatory reading!

And then I read the next day's Journal!

K&R!!!!

:kick:

and more obvious and nakedly violent in their attempts to hold on to power.

Michael Moore said it best: they are like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. They can still howl and do harm to anything that comes within their reach, but eventually, they are going down.

"And the day shall come with a red, red dawn
And you in your gilded halls
Shall taste the wrath and vengeance of the men in overalls."

by Harry Kirby McLintock 1916