The Great Vanishing

Let us say their names.

They took Ira Hayes down from the Pentagon website a few days back. Hard to say exactly when because of the strategic onslaught which is, by design, meant to destabilize through chaotic disruption.

Ira Hayes was a Pima Indian and a Marine. He raised the flag over Iwo Jima and is immortalized in the Clint Eastwood film, The Flags of Our Fathers and the folk song written by Peter LaFange that Johnny Cash and Townes Van Zandt routinely covered.

But Ira is in good company. Right before he was erased, independent contractors were dispatched as a compromise between the District of Columbia and the White House to take jack hammers to Black Lives Matters square.

And today an executive order was issued by the White House to clean up the Smithsonian “to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology.”

Somewhere in the backwater blur of this blitzkrieg that has overran every bulwark weakened by the steady erosion of democratic principles and norms over the past fifteen years, you might remember a man named Doctor Anthony Fauci. There was a mural of him in the lobby of the National Health Institute. But no longer.

My friend Kim walks past the wall in the Pentagon where there was a broadside reminding all who walk past of the values the world’s most powerful constitution operates under. It has now been painted grey.

And this is to say nothing of the thousands of federal employees who have been targeted and told to pack up.

And it is all happening so fast that we don’t see it and can forget they were ever there. Places like the Department of Education. Or intersections where great events took place. A spot that once had meaning and is therefore sacred and should be memorialized can now just be concrete. So we will forget.

But we cannot forget.

There is a tradition among many religions, but certainly among reformed Jews and also shared by the BLM movement to say their names. The basic principle is that a person dies three deaths. The first death is when the person leaves their body, the second is when the soul leaves, and the third is when the last living person forgets their name.

We must remember the names of the things and people and institutions and values and places that are being erased. We must say them. It is an act of defiance. Brian Friel, arguably the greatest Irish playwright of the latter twentieth century, wrote a masterwork called Translations. It dramatizes the moment when Cornwallis’ army anglicized Ireland. Literally renaming the places on maps, taking away meaning in order to commit an act of cultural genocide and subjugate the Irish people by stripping them of the very names and language and meaning.

That is what happens when Google changes a place to The Gulf of America.

What General Cornwallis did to my ancestral Irish is orphan its people in their own land. It is the vanguard of a conquering. And a prelude to unspeakable things. Because these actions remove principles and humanity and nuance, and replace them with platitudes and the color grey. It happened when the Taliban blew up thousand year old temples of Buddha, and when the books were burned outside of Berlin University.

We must say their names. We must remember. Before the hollow edifice meant to placate and pacify resistance is put up on the National Mall and in the hearts of our people and fragility wins.

Say their names.

Corporal Ira Hamiliton Hayes pointing at himself in the most famous photo ever taken.