Brief 8: Remembrance Day

Shouldn’t every day be remembrance day? I tend to think every day shouldn’t be remembrance day, but sometimes it feels like it is.

When I was young, I developed an actual physical aversion to some of the ostentatious acts of remembrance to which this country regularly commits.

As I got older, despite continuing to be generally suspicious of patriotism and militarism, I eased towards considering my former reaction somewhat churlish, childish and disrespectful. The elixir of heroism and sacrifice is a heady one.

Many modern war films and books tended to tow the right line – not overtly jingoistic, often shocking and beautiful, they chimed with the need to pay tribute to the uncommon deeds of the common man.

I continue to be somewhat torn, but what is clear to me now, as we survey this divided, bloated wreck of a country, is that the suspicion and unease I felt as a young man at what manifested as straightforward acts of gratitude and respect have been borne out.

The obsession with remembrance as an act of self-glorification only continues. It seems like it is almost the only thing that effectively interrupts the news cycle, and several times a year – look, there is the Queen, there are some guns, it is the anniversary of another date. Stop what you’re doing. Respect, only respect.

If it were only remembrance and respect, of course … but it is so clear now that something insidious is in the national character, a suffocating imposition of past glories and ersatz solemnity.

Just as we are asked to accept that there is a difference between remembrance and glorification, when they manifest in exactly the same way, I have come to see that, for all that many hold patriotism as a great good versus nationalism as a great evil, they too manifest, so often, in such a similar way as to be virtually indistinguishable.

All of this is bad. It has been a burgeoning, enforced badness that has constrained, bullied and sucked the life and goodness out of the wonderful country this might have become in the post-war years.

We elevate the idea of honour and gesture – make dates in our diaries to look like we care deeply, but learn nothing from the past or the present.

There was a Remembrance Day a couple of decade ago. I was in church, and, as I recall, the National Anthem or other patriotic song was sung. I remember being almost overcome with a peculiar, shameful horror.

The same day, an elderly relative of mine who’d fought in the Battle of Britain died. It was a strange thing. It was so long ago.