Monday, July 04, 2005

Unhallowed Ground

I hate the Fourth of July.

I don't hate America and I don't hate Independence Day.

But I've spent a lot of time studying the Battle of Gettysburg, which was fought on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd of 1863.

On the Fourth of July, dead men lay swollen and rotting in the summer heat. Rain, summoned by cannonfire, pooled in the hollows of their eyes. The stench that hung over the region was so ghastly that residents fell ill.

Lincoln didn't give his Gettysburg Address on the Fourth of July. That happened later, after the bodies were buried. Taxidermied by patent embalming procedures and shipped home. Or tumbled into unmarked graves.

On the Fourth of July, some wounded men suffered their way south in jolting wagons. Others, Confederate and Union, lay in field hospitals on the battlefield. Some drowned when a creek rose. Some had prison camps in their immediate future. Others had entered the lifelong imprisonment of cripplehood.

Severed limbs in a pile. One dead hand had calmed a nervous mare. One held a child. One coaxed corn from stony ground.

There is no sacrament in propaganda. There is no hallowing of greed. We cannot sanctify the sick arithmetic that counted men and saw the Kilkenny cat with the longest tail would always win, for it is blasphemy.

Today I saw a dead deer by the road, contorted, butternut-colored, its innards spilled on the pavement.

I hate the Fourth of July.