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Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
Independence Day is a national holiday, but personal associations -- from heroism to heroin -- are what give it meaning.
Jun 30, 2000 | Every Fourth of July all that is American and male and patriotic explodes like fireworks in my brain; all the brute, garish ceremony of a Southern boyhood comes back: the Jehovah-like thunder of Blue Angels screaming down out of an impossibly azure sky to skim the trembling waters of Tampa Bay; the triumphal rite of passage of being handed my first sparkler (my very own fire!); our old spine-tingling anthem of blood and martial sacrifice begins to play unbidden on some diabolical Victrola of the amygdala. Across my unpaved psyche marches a ragtag squadron of Colonial pipers, George Washington impersonators, bounders and confidence men in straw boaters kissing babies in the blare of a Sousa march. Every year on the Fourth of July it's the same thing.
On a recent Saturday morning, after a particularly hard week at work, I was in the kitchen eating a bagel and listening to National Public Radio. The reporter was telling a story about a World War II vet who got very sick and went into a coma and they thought he was going to die. And then he came out of the coma and his daughter came to him and said, "If this is going to be your passing, what arrangements do you want me to make?" The vet said he wanted to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
His daughter looked into the situation and found that he had to have a Silver Star to be buried at Arlington. But then it turned out her dad had actually been nominated for the Silver Star for heroism in World War II. But he never got it. And he'd never talked about it.
During the war he flew a mission in a B-24. The plane was hit by enemy fire and the rudder line was cut. Procedure said the crew should bail out. But instead they tried to fix the rudder line and keep going. And then they got attacked again. So this guy, her father, went back to his gunner's post in the plane three times and fended off attacks, and then three times went back to try to fix the rudder cable. And finally they got it fixed and completed the mission. And he was nominated for a Silver Star. But for some reason he never got it. And now he wanted a final resting place at Arlington. So he got his Silver Star.
And out of nowhere I started bawling, with the radio going and my wife looking at me. Every time I tried to talk and say what it was I just could only bawl some more. This went on for a few minutes longer than was strictly necessary to get the point across.
You know how they make sexually traumatized kids talk to puppets? How they have to act it out? I'm like that with America. I have to act it out. Only I use voices of imaginary people.
I can say this: The Fourth of July for me is a holiday redolent of tribal mutilation and fire. It symbolizes with painful acuity some boyhood dream of patriotic manhood that was either lost or stolen, I don't know which, on a long chaotic journey I barely survived and only half-remember, that I seem to have been on from roughly 1967 to 1985, a time during which that simple dream exploded into fragments of half-digested revolutionary dogma, a bland, faithless liberalism, abortive day trips to the "feminine side" and brief unpleasant encounters with some vestigial male child who wasn't raised right and maybe deserved to be beaten and left crying in a corner.
Every Fourth of July this stuff comes up.
That Saturday morning, the radio still going, when I could stop that chesty heaving and nasal keening that is so non-conducive to persuasive speech, I tried to explain to my wife how great it was that all these World War II guys had gone and saved Western Civilization and then come back, spawned half-a-dozen towheaded rascals apiece and raised them in tract homes so newly minted you could still smell the pipe dope, and now how sad it was that those guys were all beginning to pass on, threatening to orphan all of us clueless boomers still trying to program our VCRs.
I admit that one thing behind all my blubbering was a sudden, entirely unanticipated fear of abandonment. "You can't leave, all you World War II fathers; you haven't showed us how to be adults yet!" I was also consumed by a sadness of tasks unfinished because of haste or bitterness or a desire to lock away fear in some vault of disabled affect. There was the sadness of degrees unawarded: my master's I never got because of sheer volitional torpor. (Having passed orals and gotten the thesis approved, I simply and unaccountably walked away, like an utter fool. There's no other word for it.)
Upon reflection, it became clear that the soldier's story of arduous work long gone -- unrewarded and finally recognized -- dovetailed with my own story of the abandoned master's degree. My dad also was in line for a master's at University of Chicago that he never completed until finally he was fired from some journalism job and my mom made him buckle down and finish the thing; I'm from a long line of male non-finishers.
Anyway, these days I'm so torn up about Vietnam and manhood and drinking and fathers that I have to work it out in voices. So I put the voices on paper and call it a novel. I figure, bottom line, finish the novel before lapsing into a coma. Maybe they don't bury novelists at Arlington, but then nobody's shooting at me while I type.
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