by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Sinister Minister
I put on KPBS for the 29th annual National Memorial Day Concert —
though the term “concert” probably should be put in quotes because whatever
these annual extravaganzae are, they’re not “concerts” in any but the broadest
sense of the term. They’re held annually on the National Mall in Washington,
D.C. within eyeshot of all the war memorials in the place (including the
preposterous one honoring the veterans of World War II, for which the
architect’s renderings looked so over the top they were compared to Albert
Speer and it was suggested that the only way this would be an appropriate World
War II memorial would be if Germany had won — though frankly to me it looked
less like an Albert Speer production than something MGM’s art department head,
Cedric Gibbons, would have come up with for an Esther Williams water ballet),
and the orchestra is Washington’s regular one, the National Symphony, conducted
by Jack Everly, who took over the task when the concerts’ founding conductor,
Erich Kunzel, died. What these “concerts” really are is performances by actors presenting real-life
stories of heroism among America’s veterans and also tales of recovery from
life-threatening injuries sustained in combat, often accompanied by mention of
the loved ones that helped take care of the vets and nurse them back to a
semblance of normal life. This content has so overwhelmed the musical numbers that after a
stentorian opener sung by African-American baritone Christopher Jackson with a
full chorus as well as the National Symphony, it was 20 minutes before we got
another musical selection that wasn’t being narrated over. It also doesn’t help that the concert seems to
get the same people to participate over and over: the hosts are Joe Mantegna (a
regular) and Laurence Fishburne; Gary Sinise pre-taped his contribution because
he’s witnessing the birth of his first grandchild, but as one of Hollywood’s
few “out” Right-wingers he’s long been affiliated with this event; and some of
the musical guests, notably singer Ronan Tynan (not a great singer but a
genuinely heartfelt one), were also familiar from prior years.
The first
tribute segment was to Col. Richard Cole of what was, when he served, the U.S.
Army Air Corps (it spun off into a separate service, the U.S. Air Force, after
World War II), who’s 101 years old and the last survivor of the Doolittle Raid
on Tokyo in 1942. (Cole had an injury that kept him from the concert stage but
we were assured he’s still all right.) Robert Patrick played Cole effectively
against a montage of actual World War II clips. Then Fishburne introduced a
tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen and the five survivors of that quite compelling squadron were introduced on stage.
After that the National Symphony Orchestra played a piece called
“Commemoration” by Robert Wendell, and tenor Russell Watson sang a sappy
inspirational song called “You Raise Me Up.” The next segment was one of the
most compelling stories of the night: Luis Avila from Metairie, Louisiana, who
had already done three tours in Iraq when he was sent to Afghanistan in 2011
and assigned a fourth which ended abruptly when an improvised explosive device
(IED) blew up the armored vehicle his team were in and left him comatose for two
years and with one less leg than nature’s design for him. The really moving
part of his story was the sheer dedication of his wife to looking after him and
working to bring him first out of his coma and then render him mobile and
articulate. The Avilas were played by a real-life Latino/a acting couple, John
and Ana Ortiz, while the orchestra played such standard “inspirational” works
as the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria” and the “Largo” from Dvorák’s “New World”
symphony that eventually got turned into a faux spiritual, “Goin’ Home.” Later the Ortizes explained
that a key part of Avila’s therapy had been playing him music, and he and his
musical therapist, Robeson Vadrian (I think I scribbled down her name more or less correctly),
made a subsequent appearance on the show. After the producers told the Avilas’
story, Renée Fleming, operatic superstar, was brought on to sing “Wind Beneath
My Wings” — a thoroughly pathetic (in both senses) piece of work — and then Ms.
Vadrian and Luis Avila came out and joined her for “God Bless America.” Avila’s
contributions were pretty toneless but still moving given all that he’s been
through and how vividly we’d just seen it dramatized, and Vadrian got swamped
by the world-class operatic voice on stage with her, but Fleming herself was
audibly a lot more turned on by
“God Bless America” than “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and it showed. Afterwards a
singer named John Radamzick who’s part of a group called Five for Fighting came
out and did a song that variously seemed to be called “All for One” and
“Together We’ll Rise,” which sounded strikingly like U2: the same sort of
stentorian lead voice, the same clucking noises on guitar, the same aura of
strained seriousness.
After that we got Mary McCormack, the marvelous lead
actress on the woefully short-lived (four seasons) USA Network TV series In
Plain Sight about the federal witness
protection program, playing Jacke (that’s how she spells her first name!)
Walton, who waited 33 years for her father to return from Viet Nam alive or
dead — she even had a letter she had written him when he was in country, which
had been returned to her shortly before her mother was officially notified that
he and his entire patrol had never returned from an operation — before his
remains were finally found and she opened and re-read the letter she’d written
him as a child. After that a country singer named Scottie McCreary came out to
do a song called “In the Patch Between,” and then retired general and former
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, another “regular” on the Memorial Day concert stage, came
out for a tribute to the late Jerry Colbert, who thought up the idea for these
elaborate “concerts.” Then an unidentified bugler blew “Taps” as a memorial for
all America’s war dead, and
afterwards they introduced the current chair and vice chair of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Joseph Dunford and Paul Selva, as well as the usual medley of the
songs of all the U.S. armed services (including not only the Coast Guard but
even the National Guard — did you know the National Guard had an official theme song? Neither did I) before there
was a sort of token bow to the whole idea of a world without war, with Vanessa
Williams joining Patrick Lundy and a gospel choir called The Ministers of Music
doing “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” As an anti-war song it’s hardly at the
level of, say, John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but it’s a traditional piece and
therefore “safe” enough for this context. The show closed with Christopher
Jackson and the full forces returning for “America the Beautiful” — an
uplifting ending to a show that remains perched uneasily between glorification
of the U.S. military and its mission (and the many defense contractors who
contribute to keeping this show on the air — Lockheed Martin is the lead
sponsor and General Dynamics got a later plug) and an acknowledgment in some of
the stories told of the human cost of war and how, while war may at times be a
necessary evil, it is still evil.
