It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but we happen to like living next to a cemetery.
We don’t find it creepy or ghoulish to live in the shadow of grave markers. Death is a fact of life. Human beings have the merciful capacity to forget about their mortality for long stretches, until a family tragedy — or a near miss — reminds them that death isn’t something that only happens to other people.
A cemetery can be a quiet haven, especially an atmospheric one like the one on St. Peters Church Road. Reading the names, ages, and cause of death on the oldest stones, which date back to the early 19th century, is a lesson in the history of public health. Lives were much shorter in the “good old days,” some of them tragically short, as the many tombstones for infants and children attest.
Social history is encoded in the markers, too. The rich marble and sculptural aspirations of some of them proclaim, “Here’s a guy who made it, big-time!” To me, those fanciful obelisks and carved urns are no more powerful than the modest little stones that say simply, “I was here, too.”
Not all cemeteries are as well situated as the one next door to us. Blue Mountain rises in the distance like a vast amphitheater; the short footpath seems to dead-end on an eternal stage. But all of them represent the promise of continuity: remember your past, the granite seems to whisper, and you, too, will be remembered.
Cemeteries are hallowed ground, which is why a senseless crime perpetrated against them, like the vandalism of the Evergreen and Union cemeteries in Duncannon a few weeks ago, feels like such a primal violation.
There are two ways to attack a cemetery: knowingly, or out of ignorance.
The knowing attack, based on a religious or political agenda, is meant either as an attempt to erase the past completely, or as an emotional assault on an enemy. One thinks of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in Europe with swastikas, for instance, as a very pure crystallization of hatred. Or, at somewhat more of a remove, the destruction of the ancient statues of Buddha by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.
These are calculated attacks. The swastikas are meant to invoke a genocidal regime, and thus strike terror in the hearts of a new generation. The shelling of carved Buddhas is an expression of the ascendance of Islam, yet another face of the sacking of the temple that occurs whenever a new religion supplants an older one.
It’s worthwhile to note that Islam isn’t the only great monotheism to put its might behind religious intolerance. Both the Hebrew and Christian bibles have plenty to say about the merits of destroying false idols, the operational word here being “false,” as in, “not ours.”
There’s a technical term for what the Taliban did to those mountain carvings: iconoclasm; i.e., the breaking of an icon. We tend to think of an iconoclast as a good thing, someone who’s willing to break with orthodoxy in order to find a new path forward. As a country, we celebrate the upending of tradition in the name of progress. But there is a cost to the shattering of a tradition, particularly to those who fervently believe in it.
I doubt that the vandals in Duncannon were launching an assault on tradition. In fact, “vandal” is a good word for them. It’s based on an East Germanic tribe, the Vandals, who were best known for sacking Rome, the capital of the civilized world, in the 5th century. The senseless destruction of that city, in all of its cultural glory, led to the idea of a barbarian too stupid to know what he’s destroying.
A drunken teenager rampaging through a cemetery knocking over headstones fits this description pretty well. Too young and ignorant to understand the financial and emotional implications of his crime, he puts his back into it for adolescent reasons: impressing his friends with his “daring;” expressing his hormonal frustration and boredom in a deserted place at a deserted hour; feeling briefly powerful, having toppled a potent and taboo symbol of the past.
In other words, a child trying on a man-sized crime.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 03 February 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
