Glory out of Tune

Memorial Day. Bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Connecticut Turnpike. California families flocking to Lake Tahoe. S.M.U. and Texas University graduates pouring across the causeways into Galveston. Memorial Day: a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.

The custom of observing the day as a tribute to men fallen in battle was initiated by the women of Mobile, Ala., in 1865, and picked up by the Soldiers' and Sailors' Union in Washington, D.C., a year later. In cities large and small, the American Legion marched, trumpets blared tunes of glory as the citizenry paid homage to the dead of Bull Run, Belleau Wood, Bastogne.

That sort of demonstrative patriotism began to fade with Viet Nam. In the last few years, the most prominent Memorial Day services have been held by war protesters--but even they no longer seem to muster much enthusiasm or anger. Still, the war dead--especially those fallen in that most wretched of American conflicts--were remembered, if only in the privacy of the homes that lost them. Inevitably, they also must have been remembered by a President who was thousands of miles away in quest of elusive peace.

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