Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

You wouldn’t know it from our drive-by media, but today was the 62nd anniversary of the D-day invasion, where unimaginable numbers of allied soldiers were mowed down by Nazi machine gun entrenchments as they literally disembarked from their boats in an effort to puncture the European mainland and free giant swaths of the continent from Nazi occupation. An event like this doesn’t get even a fraction of the attention as some other historical events from the same time period, such as the dropping of two atomic bombs in Japan. Every August we’re treated to yet another round of media hand-wringing and protests and somber people with lit candles, questioning the use of the bombs, pondering their effect on history, and castigating the United States for such barbarianism. The same intensity of feeling and media attention is absent each year on the D-day anniversary. For whatever reason, the lives lost at D-day aren’t as worthy of yearly commemoration.

I watched a program on the history channel this evening about the 72 hours immediately following D-day, and I thought of my grandfather, as those types of programs usually cause me to do. I’m 31 years old, and I live a comfortable life that most people in this world can only dream of. At worst, I’ve suffered temporary hardship and mild disappointment. When my grandfather (and maybe yours) was my age, he had lived through the Great Depression on a farm in Indiana. He had joined the navy (perhaps a bit under age) and served in Luzon, in the Philippines, where he was a surgical tech. He had earned his purple heart when a jeep he was in drove over a mine, temporarily blinding him. He earned a number of other awards helping victims of that same explosion while he was blinded. (Grandpa never talked about it much and nobody in the family knows all the details.) He had given up his dream of becoming a doctor in order to support his family after his own father died. He had earned his degree in Criminal Justice from Ball State University and was a few months away from marrying my grandmother. My first 31 years have been sparse in comparison.

Immediately after my show was over, Josh changed the channel to watch his show, Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D List. After spending an hour absorbed in D-day, Kathy Griffin’s self-involvement was hard to stomach. If you haven’t seen her show before, here’s the wrap-up: Ms. Griffin is a fourth-tier, but wealthy, celebrity who desperately wants the approval and recognition of other, more wealthy celebrities who wouldn’t take time to piss on her if she were on fire. Why she must have their approval is beyond reason. I realize her (feigned?) desire to be part of the in crowd may be nothing more than a premise to portray her as an underdog and a device to mock more pretentious people, but the whole show makes her seem exceedingly unappreciative of the charmed life that fortune, and people such as those from the D-day generation, have afforded her.

Ceaseless angst is equally unappealing both as a television premise and as history.