Idyllic Memorial Day in Venice Beach, California. Since San Diego was atypically gloomy, we decamped for the weekend at the Jolly Roger Motel in Venice and biked and roller-bladed up and down the coast trails to Santa Monica and back. Heaven – except for the sunburn. I love motels. When I first arrived here in America seventeen years ago, a buddy and I rented a car and drove through 30 or so states, from Miami to L.A. to Seattle to Boston. We often stayed in cheap motels. My favorite was one right out of a Coen brothers movie in Ozona, Texas – crazy owner, weird noises through the night, howling hounds in the back, and so on. Maybe it’s being an immigrant but I live for this kind of Americana. Perhaps for the same reasons, I also love Memorial Day. England celebrates its war-dead in far gloomier fashion – in November, with commemorative poppies, services, and so on. America does all that – but also takes the day off and celebrates the first day of summer. And what could be more American? The point of the sacrifice we commemorate, after all, was to preserve this country’s freedom, an inextricable part of which, for most Americans, is the ability to goof off, drag out the barbecue, or head to the beach. It’s memories of Memorial Days like these that probably kept many soldiers posted abroad vaguely sane over the years. Reminiscences like these are also probably what any American soldier always longs to get back to. Which is why the best way to commemorate them is to renew those memories each year; mint them anew – even in the Jolly Roger Motor Hotel.
BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Mr. Bush is proposing a diminution of the government’s ability to protect its citizens that is breathtaking in its scope. His environmental agenda would put more arsenic in the water and more pollutants in the air.” Yes, it’s Paul Begala and Jim Carville in their Sunday New York Times op-ed. Of course, what they mean by the government’s ability to “protect” its citizens means protecting Americans from the right to control and spend their own money without government funneling up record amounts of it. Another interesting nugget in the piece is the frank admission that fully funding a massive, open-ended prescription drug benefit for seniors will indeed destroy fiscal health unless taxes are kept high, and in the short term, raised even higher. But heck, you gotta win Florida somehow.
AFTERLIFE: The strange post-career of an ex-president, Bill Clinton. Check out the latest piece from the Sunday Times (of London) posted opposite. Back in D.C. later today. Post-Memorial Day service will continue as soon as I touch ground.
The Dish 