Prayers on Memorial Day
The United States pauses on this day to honor those who served and did not come home. This site opens in their memory.
Peace Racket was born on Memorial Day. The country pauses, by law and by custom, to remember the dead — the men and women who put on a uniform, went where they were sent, and did not come back.
The custom is older than the holiday. The holiday is older than the country in its present form. The form is changing, as forms do. The dead remain.
The date of this launch is not incidental. It was chosen.
Peace Racket — the book, the poem, the song, and this site — is a work about the apparatus that produces those dead, and the citizenry that has been losing track of how the apparatus operates. Smedley Butler — a Quaker, a Marine, twice given the Medal of Honor — came home in 1935 and named what he had been part of. He called it a racket. He spent the last five years of his life saying so, in plain language, from any pulpit that would have him. He died in 1940. The pamphlet has not been out of print since.
The line of warriors and witnesses he stood inside runs back twenty-three centuries before him. It runs forward to today. Each name in that line saw war up close and came back saying the same thing.
So did, in their own way, the seven thousand Americans we have lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. So did the thirty thousand veterans who have died since by their own hand. So did the families and the towns and the schools that absorbed the cost, often without the country at large knowing the bill had been sent.
Memorial Day is for them. Sentimentality is not.
The argument of this project is that the only honoring of the dead that finally matters is making sure the next war they would have been asked to fight does not happen the way the last ones did — sold to a citizenry that was not asked, funded by debt the next generation will pay, and waged for ends that were not the ones on the brochure.
That is a tall order. It is also old work. The materials are in the warehouse. The blueprint is in the file cabinet. The Constitution is still the document, and the citizen is still the figure it opens with. The work is to choose to do it.
The book is one piece of that work. The poem is another. The song is another. This site is where the pieces gather, and where, over time, the rest of the work — readers, listeners, neighbors, the citizens of other towns and other countries who have arrived at similar conclusions through their own routes — will gather with it.
If you are new here: welcome. Start with the book. The Essential Edition is short on purpose. Read it in a sitting, then read the poem aloud, and decide what kind of citizen you intend to be from this Memorial Day forward.
If you are not new here: thank you for coming back. The racket is louder when more of us are making it.
Give Peace its voice. Give Peace its noise. Give Peace its song.
Start with the Essential Edition — short on purpose, written to be read in a single sitting. Subscribe to receive the editorial updates: