Life's a Beach

Thoughts on a uniquely American holiday

I know that you, faithful reader (aka “mommy”), value my insight on the major issues of the day. You come to me on who to vote for, what opinion to have, which sheep to follow to the slaughter, and I reward you with cunning insights into the Caligula-like nightmarescape of the American political system.

However, with this week’s column I’d like to pay tribute to that most memorialized holiday: Memorial Day Weekend. Ask yourself, what is Memorial Day? What exactly are we celebrating that is not completely redundant with some other holiday? Do we honor our veterans (Veteran’s Day)? Our flag (Flag Day)? Our patriots (Patriot Day)?

Actually, Memorial Day was originally called “Decoration Day” and honored the Civil War’s Union dead for their sacrifice so that black people might live in de facto slavery as sharecroppers for the next fifty years. These days we use Memorial Day to honor those who have died in the many, many additional U.S. wars, armed conflicts, and police actions. Thankfully, with its thoughtful work in Iraq, the administration of George W. Bush has added a large pool of soldiers to celebrate on this day, as the number of soldiers needing memorialized was fast dwindling before he took office.

Yes, Memorial Day is about honoring our war dead.

We Americans do this specifically by watching really fast cars go around in circles 500 times, consuming mind-blasting amounts of gasoline, beef, and beer, and generally making ill-advised vacation decisions with family members we secretly harbor little affection for.

I’m an American, and I’m no different. This Memorial Day I headed to the sweet and salty coast of Virginia Beach, a tourist destination that would make Karl Marx’s head explode if he somehow traveled forward in time for a visit. As I strolled the sidewalks of this capitalist’s wet dream, watching middle and lower-class Americans pump as much money into overpriced parking, food, drinks, and chintzy knick-knacks as the businesses could fit into their registers, I could tell the only thought on anyone’s mind was our brave men and women fighting for freedom overseas.

The same feeling overwhelmed me while sitting on the beach for upwards of five hours hydrating myself with Coronas. The beach is always an interesting experience for me regardless of the circumstances. Being a fellow of the fair-skinned persuasion (i.e. a “cracker-ass cracker”), I find applying sunscreen is kind of like playing a game of chess with the Sun. The Sun is always looking for an in—a missed spot on my forehead or chest to render bright pink and flaking for weeks—and I’m always whipping out the SPF 30 when I think that smug bastard has found one. Anyway, there I was, having just discovered that I was getting too drunk because when I tried to shove the lime into my Corona and float it to the bottom of the bottle by turning it upside down with my thumb jammed in the neck, I succeeded only in spraying beer all over myself and subsequently went about licking it off my arms so as not to waste the precious moisture, when suddenly I saw this woman.

I could tell this lady was a true patriot, and while her generously-proportioned body may have been standing on a bright, idle beach on a beautiful Virginia day, her heart and soul were clearly overseas searching for bombs loaded with shrapnel and human feces in the high reeds on the banks of the Tigris River. I could tell this because her gelatinous rear end and sagging, eye-averting breasts were clad in none other than the flag of the United States of America.

That’s right: an Old Glory two-piece. A Stars and Stripes bikini. A Red, White, and Blue naughty bits conceal-o-shroud.

“Now that,” I said to myself as I gathered reasons for my future dermatologist to cut moles from my flesh, “is what this grand day is all about.”

Which brings me to my next point:

Thoughtful, considered appreciation for the sacrifices military men and women have made throughout this country’s long and painful history of violent conflict—some of it for the highest of reasons and some of it for no reason at all—is for pussies. That’s right, I said it. Only wimpy little menstruating vaginas sit around and ponder the larger meaning of sacrificing life for principle, of placing a nation’s sons and daughters at the doorsteps of death, chaos, and terror and asking them to face it down without question or dissent.

Memorial Day is about sitting in traffic with the air conditioning on. It’s about paying whatever the price on the pump says and not listening to bitchy little NPR liberals whine about the correlation between gasoline consumption and the Iraq war dead. It’s about the beach, the sun, and giving the economy a nice little kick in the ass right before the summer begins. That’s why no one calls it “Memorial Day” but rather “Memorial Day Weekend”. The point is not the memorial, it’s seeing the biggest blockbuster movie, finding the beach with the best weather, and generally sucking down as much of this sweet American life as possible before we all have to go back to work on Tuesday (well, not me; I’m unemployed).

As I sat there on my towel in the Virginia heat, waves lapping at the sand, beer drying stickily to my neck, chest, and arms, and admired the sheer amount of flag stretching across this woman’s trunk, I could only smile and apply a second coating from a sunscreen stick to my nose, a move I considered the equivalent of taking down the Sun’s rook. “Your move, Sun,” I told that slick, yellow son of a bitch. “Your move.”