I dislike ceremony, tradition. Things like graduation ceremonies, marriage ceremonies, etc. and so on. These things generally bore the hell out of me at the same time as they perplex me.

The reason why I loathe them is that they just become rote behavior…like…OK, maybe in the first marriage ceremony it was touching that the husband and wife exchanged vows to declare the sanctity of the bond, but after it’s done enough times, it just becomes a formality. Kind of like how when you go watch a Hollywood action movie, the plot is completely unimportant. You know…you’re really just enjoying the explosions and car chases while Neo / The Terminator / Rambo cross all the major plot points on the way to triumph.

(What’s really funny to me, as an aside, is the ceremony of the Academy Awards, where all these actors and actresses go on and on about winning their really important award for churning out more tripe to dull our brains when we need to escape.)

Anyway, so here’s one ceremony that also irks me: the military funeral. At some point Taps, and songs like it, were real expressions of emotion and loss. But, once you do it for one dead guy, you have to keep on doing it, and now it’s become such a formality that we have developed “Taps technology”.

As this article points out, the U.S. Defense Department has developed, along with private industry, a fake bugle that a non-bugler can hold up to his lips, so that he can pretend he is playing the Taps.

Each one of these things cost $500, but the article didn’t specify how much was expended in developing the device.

I guess all I have to say is: is this where you want your tax dollars going?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2003 at 1:08 and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.