Dignity

The most charming part of the University of Oregon campus is Pioneer Cemetery. The Cemetery was established in 1873 and the University grew around it. The tallest, and oldest, trees on campus grow on the Cemetery, and it’s a wonderful place to walk, anytime of year. The last plot was sold in the 1940s, but I believe that there were still some funerals into the 1990s. There was a proposal in the late 1980s, I believe, to turn the entire cemetery into a parking lot and erect a single monument to everyone buried there. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed.

I like to walk through old cemeteries, partly for the peace and quiet, but mostly for the sense of history. Eugene was very small in 1873, and reading the stones is a bit like reading the story of the town. One day, I wandered the cemetary looking for victims of World War I or World War II. I only found one, and I don’t remember his name. He died, if I recall rightly, in November of 1917. The epitaph read “Died in France”, which I thought was particularly subdued and appropriate. No sloganeering, no attempt to make something more of this death, no effort to paint a picture of a greater struggle. Just “Died in France”, and we can draw our own conclusions. It seemed dignified to me.

There is no dignity in this.

One would at least expect the Pentagon to stop its sloganeering when a soldier’s been killed. Not so. In a shift of long-standing policy, the Pentagon is now engraving the slogans it chose to increase public support of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan — that is “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation Enduring Freedom,” respectively — onto the tombstones of soldiers killed in action there. And it would seem they do this whether the family likes it or not.

There is no subtlety. There is no respect, either for the soldier or for the observer. There is simply the absolute need to conscript every aspect of a person’s life into the service of polemic.

It’s tragic.