choosing the right word

most of the world is celebrating Armistice Day today, and i've held an odd numerological romance for the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month since childhood. i don't remember how i encountered this bit of information as a tyke, but i can only assume it had something to do with my love of Trivial Pursuit. but this is beside the point.

the point is that in the United States we stopped celebrated Armistice Day in 1954, less than a month before the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. the man's name came to be synonymous with demagoguery, but he was also a prodigious drunkard, and it seems appropriate that the inaugural celebration of Veterans Day occurred while he was still looking for communists and "pixies" underneath the skirt of Army head counsel Joseph N. Welch.

the right word is sometimes hard to find (just ask Flaubert), and this morning i was in the shower thinking about Armistice v. Veterans Day. it occurred to me that the former focuses on the end of conflict, the resumption of peace, a tombstone for "the war to end all wars."

(this was one of the casualties of Eisenhower's America)

the latter valorizes the people who fight war, the instruments by which violence is articulated on a global scale, and this implicit militarization of language (de)forms the structure of society by imprinting and encoding itself into our holidays and common speech. it seems the ultimate result can be only a glorification of war itself, which begs the question:

where is our Armistice Day?