In Bad Decline

If you bumped into me on the sidewalk or in the hallway, I might have mentioned that the visit--now one month ago--to Gettysburg on the Fourth of July was, um, thought-provoking in all sorts of unanticipated ways.  The places--war memorials, battlefields, and the famous cemetery--struck a chord with me. I was intrigued by being there.  But I thought some of the re-enactment stuff was odd--odd dialed beyond historical fetishism and into a new range of fantastical dress-up geekery.  I recovered and was more or less granted amnesty, I think, for what was a glaring foot-in-mouth moment during which I compared the degree of geekery between Civil War re-enactors and the Lucas-heads who attend Star Wars conventions dressed as Chewy and C3PO. 

In one of those subsequent, casual, "we went to Gettysburg" hallway conversations, I mentioned how the re-enactments left me with a lingering uneasiness about what was happening at those sites now. Re-enacting war is a strange brew: a half-and-half concoction blending parts of the worst of Hollywood spectacle and adult play-acting (no matter how seriously) in the grim, horrific, and atrocious war-deeds perpetrated on those now-hallowed grounds. Chilling, but hard to pin down because I didn't openly object to it (the geekery comment was never meant to disparage anyone), and I don't have any problem with gestures of tribute, respect, and commemoration.

Eventually, in that hallway conversation, the person I was talking with asked me if I'd read George Saunders' short story "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline."  I hadn't read it; hadn't read anything by Saunders, even though his name is the first one that pops up when I mention Writing Program and Syracuse U. to anyone who has lived in Central N.Y. for a few years (and then I have to explain how Saunders is in the creative writing program, which hangs its colorful hat in English and Textual Studies, and 'no I've never met him or studied with him', and so on, until the perplexed looks give way to a change of topic).  "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," if you haven't read it, is a dystopian romp through a gang-plagued, run-down, underfunded Civil War park.  At breakneck pace, Saunders writes of a great range of escapades as the ethic of historical preservation gives way to a relentless assault by modern forces.  Reading it did not make me feel better about the re-enactments; neither did it make me feel worse.  But I laughed, and I also thought more carefully about that profoundly difficult balance between celebrating war and properly reckoning with the horrible mess it always (and to this day) makes of lives.

Here's Saunders, a point where the new gun-loving employee joins the staff at CivilWarLand:

Just after lunch next day a guy shows up at Personnel looking so completely Civil War they immediately hire him and send him out to sit on the porch of the old Kriegal place with a butter churn. His name's Samuel and he doesn't say a word going through Costuming and at the end of the day leaves on a bike. I do the normal clandestine New Employee Observation from the O'Toole gazebo and I like what I see. He seems to have a passable knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter. At one point he makes the mistake of departing from the list of Then-Current Events to discuss the World Series with a Visitor, but my feeling is, we can work with that. All in all he presents a positive and convincing appearance, and I say so in my review. (14)