Here it is Friday before the famous Memorial Day weekend — once the party-igniting start to a summer of beer and chicks in halter tops — but now it’s on to $4 a gallon gas and a world shattered by shit-heads in power.
One of the most pointed writers/performers is Garrison Keillor, of “A Prairie Home Companion” fame, who crafted a real look at Memorial Day, very-aptly titled, “Mutterings Over The Graves of Soldiers.”
From salon.com:

• The Current Occupant tossed Nazis into a speech last week, something he rarely does since it only reminds people of Dick Cheney. He likened those who would negotiate with terrorists to those who tried to appease the Nazis, an awkward comparison, since Nazis were self-defined and wore the swastika proudly, and terrorists are anybody we nominate to be terrorists, who may include terrorists, people who know terrorists, people named Terry, or people with wrists. One reason Guantánamo is kept top-secret is so you and I won’t know how many innocent people have been locked up there and how little the bureaucracy cares about innocence, which might remind people of the Nazis.
  …
  The war on terror, to most people, is a lame joke, and Republicans who’ve been embedded in Washington too long are now finding that the word “terrorism” has lost its tread. This multitrillion-dollar war is going to wind down, one way or another. The Occupant will hand it off to the next president, who can then negotiate with people who know people who know terrorists and work out a way to extricate our people from the desert.
  If a Democrat does it, it will be appeasement, and if a Republican does it, it will go down as a courageous act of statesmanship, but one way or another, it will be done.
  …
  Meanwhile it’s almost Memorial Day and here is a vet on television talking hopefully about his dream of making a good life who has been horribly burned and grafted back together, his head looks like a candle stub with a mouth and blinking eyes. Your heart goes out to the brave young man. And what choice does he have other than to be brave? It’s either that or the life of a potato. But who did this to him?
  On Memorial Day we’ll hear about men who gave their lives for their country, but many lives were not given, they were taken, and taken stupidly and carelessly. And there has been great public piety about those men and their “sacrifice” on the part of politicians who blithely sacrificed them.
  — Garrison Keillor, salon.com/opinion/Keillor, (5/21/08)

Read Keillor’s entire piece, either at salon (which can be troublesome to log onto) or at antiwar.com, where we found it.

Memorial Day will never feel the same even after the last eight years have ended.