Memorial Day, 1990 - 25 May 1990

About a year after the end of the American Civil War, in the spring of 1866, a surgeon who'd served with the infantry from Abraham Lincoln's state started, with a handful of friends, a society to help widows and orphans.

He set up a post which he hoped would be the first of a national chain. He gave the society the grand name of the Grand Army of the Republic, and, by the autumn, by which time people had had time to notice the sad plight of the neighbouring widows and their children, there were already 39 posts scattered around the country. And in the November, they held their first National Encampment.

The GAR, as it came to be called, was the first of the veterans' organisations and at one time, just 100 years ago, it had close to half a million members. After that it steadily declined and by the outbreak of the Second World War had practically ceased to exist.

Other, and eventually more powerful, organisations started up beginning with the American Legion which came out of the First War and it was supplemented by the veterans of foreign wars, veterans of Vietnam and many others catering to the needs, especially, of the disabled.

The last relic of the Grand Army of the Republic is a ceremony which turned into a public holiday. The second commander of the GAR, one General John Logan, in the beginning called on members of the order to lay flowers on soldiers' graves on the 30th day of every May.

It was called, until fairly recently, Decoration Day. It's now known as Memorial Day. And this is the Memorial Day weekend. It's a legal holiday in almost all the states of the union, and will be observed with religious ceremonies, with political speeches, in the south with visits to famous battlefields of the Civil War and, of course, everywhere, with department stores' sales, beach picnics and general whooping it up.

It's been moved forward a week this year and the Congress, like most working and non-working groups, will take a recess.

The occasion has led me to think that somebody should start to lobby for more national and legal holidays because whenever one is coming up, the president and the party leaders start to galvanise their flocks, to polish off some pending legislation, before they all go home.

The most flagrant proof that Congress needs a whip to move it into swift action will come at the end of June, before the Independence Day holiday, which also coincides with the end of the fiscal year. By that time, the government payroll is running out of money.

Every year, we're told in one desperate week, that if Congress doesn't pass an emergency bill there will be no more wages for the hundreds of thousands of office workers, post office employees, national park crews, government hospitals, for anybody and everybody who works for the government.

There's always a cannonade of resounding speeches lamenting the shame of what is an annual situation. And the house, which is the fount of all money bills, argues and bemoans and stays up all night, sometimes all of two nights, and at dawn on the third day comes through with an emergency appropriation and announces that the republic has again been saved and its million or two loyal wage slaves will not go without bread.

This past week, with school about to break for Memorial Day, the president, wanting something to show for any Memorial Day speeches, urged his men in the house to see through what has been called "the most sweeping Civil Rights Bill in two decades". It's called the Americans With Disabilities Act and it's going to cost a whopping outlay of cash.

Airplanes, buses, trains, public buildings, lavatories, offices, factories, theatres, restaurants, must all construct ramps and/or other devices to help the crippled. Competent people who are blind or deaf may not be denied jobs for which sign language or Braille previously disqualified them. The same applied to victims of Aids and drug addicts who are under treatment.

When the bill was passed in the house by a thumping 403-20, he was a brave congressman who would come out against the disabled. A great cheer went up from over 200 people in wheelchairs who'd watched the last hours of the debate in a chamber inside the house building. It was a moving moment of triumph. The legal battles over fringe definitions of disability will come later.

That happened on Tuesday. On Wednesday, with Congress hoping to wind up its current business by Thursday midnight, the Democrats forced into the open, and to a vote, a bill over which both parties have been wrangling for months, a new gun control bill.

You may remember that months ago, after a particularly hair-raising mass murder by a deranged young man using an assault weapon, a small repeating machine- gun he cradled in his arms, the president approved a bill outlawing assault weapons but only if they were made abroad. The National Rifle Association raised hob at the suggestion that the man should apply to the domestic manufacturers who do a roaring business.

The stubborn argument of the NRA in favour of allowing citizens to own guns has always been based in the Bill of Rights in the Second Amendment to the Constitution which says, when the National Rifle Association is quoting it, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed". What the NRA never quotes, nor the million of gun-toting Americans – the vast majority, of course, are harmless sportsmen, shooting or hunting, as it's called here, is a regular weekend occupation of all classes in the south and west and on the prairie especially, of the poorest country people – what these honest citizens don't know, and what the NRA always overlooks is the first part of that sentence in the Bill of Rights, the one condition under which "people may keep and bear arms".

This is the way it goes, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". It was written and approved by the founding fathers when the United States had no standing army and didn't intend to have one.

Armies could suddenly be seized and used by kings or other dictators, so the defence of the realm was left to the citizens of every trade who were, at one time, required to keep a gun at the ready so that the governor of a state, or the mayor or whoever, could muster a militia whenever there was a threat of insurrection.

Needless to say, while we have citizens who belong to the National Guard, the United States, like almost every other country now has an army, navy and air force to provide for the security of the state. But whenever gun control comes up in public, on a night-time television show, somebody's sure to trot out the second half of the Constitutional sentence, in hushed tones worth of holy writ, and is never challenged.

The National Rifle Association is one of the most handsomely financed – and hence most the powerful – lobbies in Washington. And from a politician's point of view, it can practically guarantee him millions of votes, from humble countrymen who are outraged at the idea that they might be forbidden to bag a pheasant or a rabbit for supper.

However, a spate of random murders in shopping malls, in schools, managed to provoke the ban on foreign assault weapons. The Democrats, except in districts which manufacture domestic assault weapons, have been slogging away to get all assault weapons banned.

And surprisingly on Wednesday, months before such an action was expected to come to a vote, they heard a gutsy speech from an Arizona Democrat who sponsored it. Senator DeConcini cried out, "There are too many bullet holes in blue suits, too many women weeping over coffins, too many children without fathers".

At the end of the debate, he got his bill through by a single vote, 50-49. Only because it is, in a way, a trial measure – it bans, for three years, the manufacture and sale of nine types of semi-automatic assault weapons.

On 1 January, a new law went into effect banning all smoking on airplanes flying within the continental land mass. Put another way, on all flights of under six hours, from coast to coast. The longest flights take between four and five and a half hours.

This means that the only plane you can smoke on is one flying from, say, New York to Alaska, which runs to a pretty heavy price for a cigarette. And last week, prompted by the new Surgeon General, there was a big outcry, special news programmes and documentaries on television about the newly-disclosed fact that the tobacco companies, the cigarette manufacturers, are doing better than ever in spite of the widespread ban on smoking in public places.

Because although they have lost between a third and a quarter of their domestic market, they've mounted a very successful campaign to push cigarettes and cigarette advertising in the Third World. We've seen some very vivid pictures of Asians and Africans of all sorts and classes puffing away in front of posters or TV screens advertising American brands.

So now there is a surging body in Congress which wants, in effect, to strangle the tobacco industry. This would be a body blow to North and South Carolina, mainly, which live by tobacco – it's the fifth cash crop in the country and the south is one great base of President Bush's conservative support.

It's a nasty irony for the president that he is, sooner or later, going to have to face in his own country what is the bane of the cocaine-producing countries of South America. How to find another crop to replace the one by which millions of people earn their living.

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