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maio 31, 2004
Memorial Day
Hoje, nos EUA, é o Memorial Day, o dia de homenagem a todos aqueles que, em combate, morreram pelo país. Deixo aqui uma crónica de Mark Steyn, no Chicago Sun Times:
"Recalling a time when setbacks didn't deter us.
Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays ''Anchors Aweigh," ''My Country, 'Tis of Thee,'' ''God Bless America'' and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens' ''Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)'' (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town's selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War's great poetry. There's a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.
Before the First World War, it was called Decoration Day -- a day for going to the cemetery and ''strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.'' Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members; others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.
I wish we still did that. Lincoln's ''mystic chords of memory'' are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862. 1843-1864.
In my local cemetery, there's a monument over three graves, forebears of my hardworking assistant, though I didn't know that the time I first came across them. Turner Grant, his cousin John Gilbert and his sister's fiance Charles Lovejoy had been friends since boyhood and all three enlisted on the same day. Charles died on March 5, 1863, Turner on March 6, and John on March 11. Nothing splendid or heroic. They were tentmates in Virginia, and there was an outbreak of measles in the camp.
For some reason, there was a bureaucratic mixup and the army neglected to inform the families. Then, on their final journey home, the bodies were taken off the train at the wrong town. It was a Saturday afternoon and the stationmaster didn't want the caskets sitting there all weekend. So a man who knew where the Grants lived offered to take them up to the next town and drop them off on Sunday morning.
When he arrived, the family was at church, so he unloaded the coffins from his buggy and left without a word or a note to anyone. Imagine coming home from Sunday worship and finding three caskets waiting on the porch. Imagine being young Caroline Grant, and those caskets contain the bodies of your brother, your cousin and the man to whom you're betrothed.
That's a hell of a story behind the bald dates on three tombstones. If it happened today, maybe Caroline would be on Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric demanding proper compensation, and the truth about what happened, and why the politicians were covering it up. Maybe she'd form a group of victims' families. Maybe she'd call for a special commission to establish whether the government did everything it could to prevent disease outbreaks at army camps. Maybe, when they got around to forming the commission, she'd be booing and chanting during the officials' testimony, as several of the 9/11 families did during Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony.
All wars are messy, and many of them seem small and unworthy even at the moment of triumph. The unkempt lice-infested Saddam Hussein yanked from his spider hole last December is not so very different from the Jefferson Davis captured in May 1865 while skulking away in women's clothing, and thereafter depicted by gleeful Northern cartoonists in hoop skirts, petticoats and crinolines.
Conquered and captured, an enemy shrivels, and you question what he ever had that necessitated such a sacrifice. The piercing clarity of war shades into the murky grays of postwar reconstruction. You think Iraq's a quagmire? Lincoln's ''new birth of freedom'' bogged down into a centurylong quagmire of segregation, denial of civil rights, lynchings. Does that mean the Civil War wasn't worth fighting? That, as Al Gore and other excitable types would say, Abe W. Lincoln lied to us?
Like the French Resistance, tiny in its day but of apparently unlimited manpower since the war ended, for some people it's not obvious which side to be on until the dust's settled. New York, for example, resisted the Civil War my small town's menfolk were so eager to enlist in. The big city was racked by bloody riots against the draft. And you can sort of see the rioters' point. More than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War -- or about 1.8 percent of the population. Today, if 1.8 percent of the population were killed in war, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.
But that's the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren't a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screwups worth re-examining, but they weren't a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn't lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.
There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites — from the deranged former vice president down — want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we're supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.
Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America. Even in its grief, my part of New Hampshire understood that 141 years ago. We should, too."
Posted by Bruno at 10:14 PM
A Gozar Connosco
O PS decidiu, nesta campanha eleitoral para o Parlamento Europeu, criticar o Governo. Discutir a política interna em vez das questões europeias. Ouvi hoje o dr. Sousa Franco (que, para informação do português comum, que nunca ouviu falar do senhor, é o cabeça de lista do PS nestas mesmas eleições) justificar o porquê desta opção. E o que disse o dr.? Um maravilhoso golpe retórico. Segundo o dr. Sousa Franco, o governo terá justificado opções de política interna com regras europeias (o que é verdade, e que eu achei a justificação errada para a opção política certa). Portanto, o dr.Sousa Franco quer explicar aos portugueses que essas regras não obrigam Portugal a seguir tais políticas. pessoalmente, pouco me interessa se obriga ou não. Acho uma política de contenção orçamental, por si só, uma boa opção. Mas o mais importante aqui é a pretensa justificação de Sousa Franco. É a tentativa de Sousa Franco de nos fazer crer que, ao discutir questões internas, de forma a criticar o governo, está no fundo a discutir a "Europa". É o dr. Sousa Franco andar a gozar connosco...
Posted by Bruno at 05:52 PM
maio 30, 2004
Eu Votava
Apesar de não termos uma Spectator portuguesa, ainda vai havendo gente que vai escrevendo coisas com qualidade, analisando bem a realidade do nosso país. Uma dessas pessoas é António Barreto. Não podia concordar mais com esta passagem do seu artigo de hoje:
"Suponhamos um Primeiro-Ministro. Um homem, ou mulher, com alma grande e sentido da responsabilidade. Alguém que tenha percebido que o tratamento de choque a que os portugueses foram submetidos é absolutamente inútil se não for consolidado por anos de disciplina, de mais produtividade, de menores expectativas e de mais responsabilidade. Que poderia hoje dizer esse Primeiro-ministro à população? Coisas tão simples! Que a estes dois anos de dificuldades e de rigor se vão seguir pelo menos mais dois de dificuldades e de rigor. Que o petróleo tão cedo não vai ficar barato. Que as taxas de juro não podem baixar mais. Que não estamos à altura da concorrência internacional. Que o desejado crescimento de um ou dois por cento é totalmente insuficiente, tanto para sociedade e o emprego como para alimentar o Estado. Que sem uma década de novos comportamentos, acompanhados de reformas profundas e difíceis (da justiça, da educação, da gestão hospitalar, da segurança social, da Administração Pública...), nada de durável se conseguirá em Portugal. Que, entre asfixias conjunturais e facilidades crónicas, nada de sério e decente se pode fazer. Que não vale a pena governar nessas condições. Que governar para ganhar eleições é uma perversão do espírito e uma falha de deveres. Que a política de "aguentar no poleiro" é uma ignóbil caricatura da nobre arte de dirigir um Estado. Que só vale a pena ganhar quando se está preparado para perder. Que, se os portugueses querem regressar à facilidade, à distribuição de bodos, à impunidade e ao aumento ilimitado de benefícios, então não têm mais do que votar em massa naqueles que aspiram à orgia das finanças públicas. Se assim dissesse, um Primeiro-ministro, qualquer Primeiro-ministro, ganharia. As eleições ou a honra. Ou as duas. Se não o diz ou não pensa, a honra, perdê-la-á certamente. E não está dito que ganhe as eleições."
Eu não hesitaria em votar em quem dissesse isto...
Posted by Bruno at 10:58 PM
O Tabefe
Continuando na melhor revista do mundo. Leio que em Terras de sua Majestade querem proibir o tabefe. Eu, claro, acho mal. Acredito nas virtudes salvíficas do tabefe, quando aplicado sobre a criança na idade certa (cedo) e no momento certo (ao mínimo sinal de comportamento subversivo). Dirão que penso isto por ter sido educado desta forma, que as consciências modernas certamente acharão bárbara. Não fui. Que me lembre, os meus pais nunca recorreram ao método do tabefe. E vejam no que deu...
Posted by Bruno at 10:43 PM
Speccie
Já aqui teci, várias vezes, elogios à The Spectator (a descoberta desta maravilha é uma das coisas que devo à Coluna Infame). Acima de tudo, porque publica coisas que são impossíveis de ler em Portugal. Veja-se esta passagem da coluna de Charles Moore:
"Tales from the Church of England. One bishop, known for the ambiguity of his sexuality, went to his doctor to complain of piles. 'It hurts near the entrance,' he told the medic. 'That's a curious way to put it,' said the doctor. 'Most people would call it the exit.' This story, by the way, is told by the bishop himself."
Maravilhoso. Homofóbico? Talvez. Mas maravilhoso. E imaginam isto a ser publicado num qualquer jornal de referência, por um dos nossos colunistas. A escandaleira que não seria...
Posted by Bruno at 10:23 PM