An invitation to seriousness
That's what Memorial Day can be
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This is the fourth post I’ve written specifically on the subject of seriousness.
In May of last year, in “Our Unseriousness Is Going To Get Us Killed,” I delved into the insinuation of identity politics into the medical field, the US Navy turning to a drag performer to boost its recruitment efforts, and how the current state of our two major political parties leaves us bereft of any kind of political-level way to address the ridiculousness.
In August, in “More Thoughts on Seriousness,” I looked at the national debt and Fitch downgrading the nation’s credit rating, the unpreparedness of people starting work in fields ranging from health care to the military to hospitality to do their jobs, Gen X, the generation now raising children and adolescents dropping away from church attendance / affiliation / involvement, faster than any other age group, behavior in movie theaters deteriorating badly, with people flagrantly violating house rules about phones and generally acting like they're at rowdy concerts, the arrogant zeal with which the current administration wishes to impose post-Western views on human sexuality in African nations, and theUnited Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopalians losing, respectively, one-fifth of the denomination’s congregations, being down to 1,140,665 active members, and the third denomination losing 400,000 members between 2012 and 2021. I also look at the other end of the institutional-Christianity spectrum, and its toxic patriarchy problem. I note that our response mainly seems to be distraction, even as “he underlying desperation is palpable.”
In October, in “Maybe Some Seriousness Is In Order,” I looked at the threats to Jews’ safety in public spaces, a matter that has not abated in the intervening months, Turkey’s Erdogan’s villainization of Israel, hostile encounters between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea, Sergei Lavrov meeting with Kim Jong Un, and Donald Trump’s then-latest display of his - well, utter unseriousness.
I concluded with classical-education advocate Jeremy Wayne Tate’s remarks on the dearth of seriousness, which I’ll provide in full again here:
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.
But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?
Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?
Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students have not been educated to know them. At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.
Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.
During my lifetime, lamentation over student ignorance has been sounded by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Mark Bauerlein and Jay Leno, among many others. But these lamentations have been leavened with the hope that appeal to our and their better angels might reverse the trend (that’s an allusion to Lincoln’s first inaugural address, by the way). E.D. Hirsch even worked up a self-help curriculum, a do-it yourself guide on how to become culturally literate, imbued with the can-do American spirit that cultural defenestration could be reversed by a good reading list in the appendix. Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.
I may not be the best spokesperson for seriousness. It took me some years of meandering to conclude that I was a writer and pursue a career earnestly. I’m married, but I never had kids, and parenthood is the surest way, assuming one is a person of basic decency, to be spurred into straightening up and getting one’s priorities in order, to care for other human beings on a level one had not yet encountered, and to get a healthy perspective on one’s own importance.
More to the point regarding today’s significance, I never served in the military. I’ve fired pistols and rifles a few times in my life, on ranges, but they were very low-stakes situations. The only time I’ve worn a uniform was during my Boy Scout years. I’ve had lifelong authority issues.
A number of journalistic assignments I’ve had over the past several springs, however, did open up new vistas of appreciation for military service.
Every year, in conjunction with Memorial Day weekend, my local paper puts out a special publication called Salute! For the first few years, I was tasked with interviewing World War II vets in our community. There was a pattern to their perspective on their service. They were generally from here, from farming families, or or families supported by small businesses. They went away and had harrowing experiences in Europe and the Pacific, came home, married their sweethearts and resumed the basics of their former lives.
Red Whittington is an example:
Red Whittington’s military service was a mere three-year episode in a life otherwise lived primarily in eastern Bartholomew County, but its impact was such that he counts the bonds with those with whom he served among the strongest he has. He reunites with them regularly, and they’ve been back to the French town they liberated several times.
His division was the Iron Men of Metz, the group that drove the Germans out of the town that was - and is - home to such architectural splendors as the Saint-Stephen Cathedral and the Basilica of Saint-Pierre-aux-Nonnains. The German army was fierce in its attempt to hold the city, and the human sacrifice on the U.S. side was immense. In one battle, 93 men in Whittington’s company were killed in a two-hour period.
He’d married his wife at a parsonage at 11th and Pearl Streets in Columbus the weekend before the Monday morning he shipped out in 1944. Before coming back to her, he was wounded three times, including artillery shrapnel in his lung.
Veterans who served in Europe after D-Day mark dates in reference to that undertaking. Whittington arrived in France on D-plus-44, which was in mid-August. By then, the Allies were operating a railroad from the coast to Paris. Whittington’s group rode the train that far and walked the rest of the way - 125 miles - to Metz.
“The French people seemed to have a good supply of bread,” he recalls. “They’d come out to the railroad tracks and give it to us.”
Whittington attributes to Providence the preservation of Metz’s historic structures: “By the grace of God, the churches seemed to be spared any damage.”
Before the city was secured, the Iron Men saw wounded being replaced on a daily basis. “The Army was transferring everybody into infantry by 1944,” he says.
Whittington wasn’t able to joint his unit for entry into Germany due to injuries. He spent a week in a French hospital and four months in a British hospital. He finished his recuperation in Schick General Hospital in Clinton, Iowa. He was aware of the end of hostilities in Europe, but his thoughts were increasingly centered on getting back to the family farm. He was discharged the day Japan surrendered.
He resumed his life prior to the tumultuous interruption of war pretty smoothly, and says that was generally the case. “Most made the adjustment, but a few didn’t. I knew one guy who became a town drunk.”
He worked for a short time at a separation center at Camp Atterbury, helping fellow soldiers make the transition to civilian life. “We discharged people at the rate of 500 a day,” he says.
A national organization for the 377th Infantry was formed in 1950, but Whittington didn’t find out about it until 1962. He has been getting back together with those he personally knew twice yearly for 40 years.
The Camp Atterbury mentioned above was a US Air Force base (originally Army) about which I also did a Salute! story:
The establishment of Atterbury Army Airfield was a demonstration in microcosm of the monumental effort the nation undertook in 1942 to gird for war.
The land on which it was built was owned by fourteen property owners who, in that year, were given thirty days to sell what was needed for the 2,000-acre facility, at a price determined by the U.S. government.
“The reason they wanted that particular land was that it was nice and flat,” says Jim Sellars, a volunteer at the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum.
Within five months, a team of 1,000-plus construction workers had built runways, barracks, hangars, mess halls, a post exchange and training, recreation and administration facilities. The base was operational in February 1943.
“A Navy plane actually landed before the base was finished,” says Sellars. “Everybody assumed he was lost.”
The war effort required more, and more types, of planes than the military had on hand. That meant increased training, which was the purpose of the base.
“Some of the first units to train at the air field were B-26 bomber crews, who saw action in north Africa and on D-Day, and the Tuskeegee Airmen, who flew B-25s,” says Sellars. “The Tuskeegee crews got as far as San Francisco and the war was over.”
The B-26, designed and built by the Glenn L. Martin Company, and the B-25, a product of North American Aviation, were medium bombers. Each was the result of the respective companies winning bids on circulars issued by the U.S. Army Air Corps in the late 1930s.
Other aircraft used for training at Atterbury included the Waco CG-4A glider, which carried troops and cargo, and the Douglas C-47, which was used to tow gliders, along with other functions.
The air base was built simultaneously with 40,000-acre Camp Atterbury, spanning much of western Bartholomew County and stretching into Johnson and Brown Counties. It was used to train ground troops.
The camp was home to 9,000-bed Wakeman General and Convalescent Hospital, the largest Army facility of its kind.
According to Sellars, “It had one of the best burn units in the country. The Army would fly the most severely injured personnel into the air base and they’d be taken to the hospital. I remember seeing ambulances going up U.S. 31 when I was nine years old.”
The effort of the Allied powers led to victories in both the European and Pacific theaters in 1945, and the air base was deactivated the following year. In 1947, the U.S. Air Force was established as a separate military branch and in 1949, the federal government reactivated the Atterbury base. The 434th Troop Carrier Wing, which flew C-46 transports, was stationed there.
In November 1954, the base was renamed Bakalar Air Force Base, after 1st Lt. John Edmund Bakalar, a Hammond, Indiana native whose P-51 D-5 plane had crashed shortly after takeoff at Gael Air Field in France in September 1944.
That remained the base’s name for the rest of its life as an Air Force facility, a time frame that saw not only more training, but airmen assigned there being called to active duty twice more, during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.
Atterbury is now our city’s municipal airport.
The men who built, and flew out of, Atterbury / Bakalar and the farm boys like Red Whittington who became the Iron Men of Metz knew how to muster requisite seriousness.
I’m not sure we have a critical mass of citizens today capable of that:
New York Democratic representative Pat Ryan said that having only 1% of Americans serving in the US military is “deeply problematic as a democracy”.
In an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation ahead of Memorial Day, Ryan, who is a veteran of the US army, said: “When you lose touch between those that are fighting our wars and their families and everyone else, that’s something so essential that we have to figure out how to bring folks together, and get more folks serving.”
Ryan, who did two tours in Iraq, said that he is working on recruiting more Americans to serve in the military.
Speaking alongside Florida’s Republican representative and army veteran Mike Waltz, Ryan said: “A lot of the work we did … on the defense bill is recruiting. Every service has been challenged on recruiting numbers and we’ve been pushing a bunch of directions to say that is not acceptable to the department of defense. And we’re starting to see the numbers come up.”
To Waltz, “service doesn’t just have to be in the military,” as he said that both he and Ryan are advocates of “getting us back to national service as a country”.
“That’s not a draft, that doesn’t necessarily have to be in uniform,” he said, adding: “It could be with the national park, inner-city tutoring, elderly care. But how do we get young people out in an environment where they’re learning leadership, discipline, followership, serving a cause bigger than themselves and with fellow Americans who may not look or come from the same backgrounds as them.”
We have an unprecedented disconnect between the concerns of civilian Americans and what keeps tyrants and barbarians from ruining our way of life.
We currently have two very hot wars transpiring on our planet, one between Ukraine and Russia and one between Israel and an array of jihadist groups and nation-states that hate its existence. Respective examples of the seriousness of each include a Russian missile strike on a Kharkiv home-improvement center that killed at least 11 and injured dozens, and a video released by the families of female IDF soldiers taken hostage by Hamas that shows them “lined up against a wall, their hands bound and the faces of some of the women . . . bruised and bloodied.”
Along the Pacific Rim, we have two enemies who make no bones about wanting to end the age in which the United States has been the guarantor of a stable international order.
You may have noticed that talk of nuclear scenarios in any and all of these cases has ramped up. Nuclear proliferation’s implications are coming home to roost.
I don’t know that it’s a certainty that it’s too late for us to see if we have a sufficient vision of what we are as a nation to unify in response to the moment.
I do feel fairly confident that we’ll get the chance to find out.
We’d do well to study the examples of very determined and focused Americans who made it possible for us to be at our current juncture - at least presently - in a state of safety and comfort.
They knew that such safety and comfort comes with a price that more than one percent of the population will have to pay.