It never fails. It's that time of year. You're walking through historic Gettysburg, trying to reinvent a certain battle in your mind as the skeeters nip at your creamy white legs, or you're treading the cobblestones gamely enough in Colonial Jamestown, listening as best you can to the tour guide with the menopause blue cologne drone on, while your eyes wander and your mind wonders whether you really could swim the steamy James River yourself back to the hotel, or you're negotiating the ankle-twisting rodent holes of the overgrown field of the Mumma Farm in Antietam, and in any of these situations you are relatively fine, striking that delicate balance between being present to some degree in the anecdotal world of history, feeling genuine reverence for the dead, with Nature simultaneously evoking and stoking your senses to escape such horrors, until that balance is shattered by an Enactor. That's right. Even by a far reach of one's precariously balanced imagination in said settings, the man or woman walking by in "period clothing" (which in itself reeks of female taboo--let's not mince words here, folks) ruins everything; the maudlin, inbred and arcane image of his or her reducto absurdum countenance in a wool uniform that wordlessly pronounces the anal maxim "if we do not learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it," is about as welcome as the sound of a loud and jarring fart, and I for one, prefer to not wait around for the things that may emanate from the orifices of these people who seem to feel they have some sort of empirical einkorn to share with me (a.k.a. ram down my throat) to justify their posing any more than I wait to "experience" what toxically emanates from the original maw of that fart. Both are obnoxious and have nothing, as far as I am concerned, to offer. Why am I so down on enactors and enacting?
If you were to ask one of the few relatives in my family who survived the Holocaust, "Would you like to participate a reinactment of this experience?" I assure you, they would firmly say, "No." Similarly, if you were to ask my former boyfriend's father whether he would participate in a reinactment of his Saigon evacuation from the roof of the American Embassy minutes before the city fell, or if you were to ask our neighbor who was one of the few infantrymen to survive the wee hours of the D-Day assault on Normandy during World War II whether he would like to reinact the 9/10 ratio of dying to living, they would think you were nuts. War is a horrible, violent, ugly thing. We all know that. And for people who have been through "the real thing," it is certainly enough: too close to the bone, never far enough in the news. Apparently, though, there are people who haven't actually fought in wars, or who haven't had enough of them if they have fought in them, who must sate their unfulfilled libidinal urges and surges by putting on gooniforms and reinacting the mayhem. (Do you know that in Tony Horwitz's book, Confederates in the Attic, for example, Horwitz documents that some people actually attempt to perfect the way they look dead, after they have been "shot" on the battlefield, contorting their bodies to actually bloat the way a dead body does? Yeah. What a healthy way to spend one's Saturday afternoon. "Hey, we had a great time at the Johnson's barbecue. Jim and I played a couple of rounds of golf and got the grill going. Joanne went and played tennis with Caitlin. Hey, Mike, what did you do?" "Oh, I went over to Spotsylvania and perfected my bloating...."
For that man who likes to play soldier, then, there's only one nepenthe. Dress him in a real uniform and send him to Afghanistan, post-haste. I assure you he will come home, if he does come home, never wanting to play dress-up again.
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