Last week, 85 year old poppy-selling veteran, Alan Lawrence, was told to leave the premises of The Bay office tower in Toronto. He was selling poppies to raise money for the Poppy Trust Fund which then makes distributions to vets who have suffered from bad retirement planning advice. Every year, as November 11th approaches, this sacred cow gets trotted out, and every year, I feel the stares of the people around me. I can almost read their minds: “Why isn’t he wearing a poppy?” And every year, I refuse.
The poppy symbol comes to us from World War I when poppies grew in abundance on Flanders Field. This quickly assumed special significance for Canadians because it was memorialized in what is arguably the most famous Canadian poem—John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.” It is a powerful poem with a haunting liturgical quality. It has even been set to music by such composers as Charles Ives, Bradley Nelson, Paul Paviour and most recently by Barry Taylor, all (except perhaps Ives) known for settings of sacred choral music. Since then, poppies have appeared on our money, our postage stamps, on license plates, and most recently on our highway signs to mark the so-called “Highway of Heroes,” the stretch of Highway 401 from Trenton to Toronto.
The poppy, with its symbolism and its liturgy and ritual, has assumed a religious status in Canadian society. There is no better indication of this than the ease with which poppy rituals are incorporated into the services at our places of worship. However, because it is an expression of secular religion, it hasn’t garnered the same infrastructure of support that our non-secular religions enjoy: long-established academic institutions and seminaries to interpret its meanings, to critique those interpretations, and to keep its practitioners honest. Instead, the best that most people offer when asked why they wear a poppy is this: we’re honouring our fallen soldiers. The more sophisticated might say: we’re acknowledging that our soldiers gave their lives to protect the freedoms we enjoy today.
Poppycock!
The problem with poppy religion is that it suffers the same ills that afflict every other religion, and as a consequence, it is vulnerable to the same process of demystification that has wormed its way to the heart of Christianity and Islam and all our other ancient takes on the world.
The foremost of these ills is its immunity from criticism. Consider the public outrage heaped upon the security guard who escorted Alan Lawrence from the premises. It is the threat of such knee jerk responses that prevents us from engaging in public debate about the meaning and legitimacy of the poppy. Yet how can we take seriously anything that doesn’t admit of close scrutiny? We end up feeling that, like the virulent homophobe whose anger masks questions about his own sexuality, like the Promise Keeper whose extravagant public pledges hide concerns about impulse control, we yell loudest when we are most insecure. Shakespeare’s insight rings true when he has the queen observe: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Our loud indignation at the rough handling of a poppy seller unwittingly reveals the locus of our fear.
What is it we fear most on remembrance day? The answer is obvious when we listen for the most extravagant claims: they died for our freedom. The obverse of this claim, the fear that lurks underneath, is that they died for reasons too trivial to tell. Or worse: they died in the commission of acts that future histories will judge as heinous. Poppy religion, like most other religion, becomes a rationalization of the irrational. Those of us who look on as the high priests of poppy religion, dressed in their garb, perform their sacred rites (laying wreaths, readings lists of names, reciting poetry) and we extrapolate from the fear that lies at the heart of these rites to the wider existential fear that grips us all. Is it possible to live and die in meaning-filled ways? Or are our lives of no more significance that those of gnats?
Another of the ills of poppy religion is that its central symbol, the poppy, supports so many meanings that it becomes meaningless. That is true of other religious symbols as well. Consider the cross. Those with vivid visual imaginations see the cross as an instrument of torture with a body broken upon it. For others, it’s a symbol of hope and renewal. Some associate it with the threat of political oppression or economic exploitation, fundamentalism, Catholicism, social affiliation, opportunity for business contacts, pretty jewelry. As a consequence, most Christians don’t wear a cross because they don’t want people to read into the cross the many meanings they reject. It is for analogous reasons that I don’t wear a poppy.
The common meaning we ascribe to the poppy, which I’ve named above, is that it commemorates those who died to preserve the freedoms we now enjoy in Canada. People say this with a straight face even when talking about soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. However, given that the Taliban have never posed a threat to Canadian sovereignty, it’s more than a little problematic to justify our presence in that country. Officially, we’re there to fulfill our obligations under NATO, the North ATLANTIC Treaty Organization. Atlantic is the important word there. Take a look at a map. Afghanistan is a landlocked country nowhere near the Atlantic, so it’s difficult to follow the convoluted international legalese that rationalizes our presence there. Let’s be blunt: we were invited into the fray to support a blood feud between our good friends to the south and a religious nut who lives in a cave. That’s it. I have no desire to invest a symbol with my moral energies for an undertaking that has no more authority than a recess fight at a grade school.
The notion that we’re in Afghanistan to support another country’s blood feud is the bright side! Darker accounts come from the likes of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges. For example, it’s arguable that our military’s primary role is to conduct business, creating demand, employing workers, stimulating the economy like any other business. Or worse, our military is a marketing strategy: we destabilize a country then provide an infrastructure more like our own – a liberal market economy. (We’re a bit like the psychotic life insurance salesman who causes “accidental deaths” to create a demand for his product.) Military operations open up markets so we can sell more stuff. This is nothing new. After World War II, the U.S. provided a $10 billion aid package for the reconstruction of Europe and ended up with Germany as a major trading partner. Ditto Japan. And this is the freedom our troops died to secure? Freedom to do business?
This takes me to my primary objection to the use of the poppy: it’s use as a public “teaching aid” on the nature of freedom. However, the unquestioning rhetoric of freedom produces an ideological enslavement. Where is this freedom that our troops died for? What is its nature?
I consider all the publicly sanctioned compulsions and addictions that abound in Canada: caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, lotteries, gaming, TV, video games, shopping. This is freedom?
As I view it, freedom is a condition of the mind. No one’s death can give me a free mind. Only I can give me that. In fact, I regard that as my primary responsibility in life. Within the purview of my freedom is the freedom to think—and to think critically—and to give voice to the conclusions that arise from my critical thinking even when those conclusions are unpopular. With the approach of Remembrance Day, I find myself exercising my freedom by voicing the unpopular conclusion that our troops are engaged in something that has no moral footing and those who have died have died for nothing.
Collectively, we have fallen victim to a sniper scenario. It’s a psychologically compelling dilemma that game theorists love to tinker with. If you’ve seen the movie Full Metal Jacket, you’ll know how it works. The sniper maims a soldier on open ground. The maimed soldier becomes bait for rescuers who, one by one, get picked off as they try to save their fallen comrade. We behave like the foolish rescuer when we say: we have to finish what we started so those who have already died will not have died in vain. Sorry, but they already died in vain and there is no redemption from that fact.
We pay the highest price for our freedom, not when we give up our lives, but when we swallow our losses and walk away. That is called moral courage. That is the freedom Ireland has chosen in answer to a long history of pointless sectarian violence. So, if I were to wear a poppy (which I won’t because I’m a poppy atheist) I would wear it to remember those who have been vilified, imprisoned, and sometimes even put to death, for demonstrating the moral courage to walk away from the enslaving rhetoric of a false freedom.