The Forgettysburg Redress

Exactly a full year ago events testing the legacy our fathers bestowed upon this continent, this nation’s crumbling commitment to freedom, a betrayal of the proposition “liberty and justice for all”

Now we are engaged in a vaguely defined war, revealing that a nation, or any nation so detached, and so deluded, can long dolor. We are met on an already abused symbol of that war. We come to desecrate a portion of it, as a neatly packaged placation for those who never died here, creating pitiable tokens for those who live. This may, in pop psychology, give “closure”. But, in a truer sense, we aggrandize -- we embellish-- we cheapen, this ground -- The ordinary people, living and dead, who struggled here, are trivialized, lost beneath our superior power to dehumanize and brand. The world will forever syndicate, and incessantly license and rerun what we say here; while it will never know, or understand why they died here.

It is unfortunate for us, the conned, the consumer and the consumed, we here ignore the great lessons looming before us -- that, from these telegenically cleansed dead we make increased idolatries to that aggressive propitiation for which they here, experienced but an iota of the full measure of consequence -- that we here blithely empurple these dead through didactic commercialization; that the nation, shall trade platitudes for latitude, so that commodification of the devastation by the government for the corporation, shall forever degrade memory’s worth.

-Clinton Fein
9.11.02