Pearl Harbor at a Discount or, Monitized Memorials of a Memory that isn’t ours. The morose and obscure comedy of the friendly welcomes at the Pearl Harbor memorial; the visors and the plastic ornaments and the Hawaiian shirts with prints of the sunken ships, wearing someone else’s grave; the people who prefer to hang out with shipwrecks of a past that wasn’t theirs. Oil rising above the USS Arizona, like the bleeding stains of American war on a green ocean. The bodies we cannot retrieve; the commercial steel we cannot get back. Families taking smiling pictures with both sides of the remnants, as if the white memorial built above excuses the dead buried below. A memorial built, not for heroism, but for loss. Solely loss. The park ranger smiling as he welcomes us to his presentation on the events of December 7th, 1941. As if this story were not a tragedy. #PearlHarbor #War #Story