President's Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day proclamation pledges to 'annihilate any foe who dares to threaten our liberty.'

The President of the United States, in advance of Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day on Sunday, issued Proclamation 10996. The proclamation is the formal document by which the federal government acknowledges the date and instructs federal agencies to observe it. The proclamation is read, in some form or another, at every Pearl Harbor service in the country on December 7.

The text of the proclamation, which is on the record at the American Presidency Project and is signed in the President’s name, contains the following sentence, which I am quoting verbatim: “The lessons learned 84 years ago on that fateful day still resound with America’s exceptional fighting force. We must remain ever vigilant and prepared to annihilate any foe who dares to threaten our liberty.”

Hon. Read the verb. The verb is annihilate.

December 7 is, by act of Congress, a remembrance. It is for the dead. It is for the 2,403 servicemen and civilians who were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The proclamation, in tradition going back to Roosevelt, is a eulogy in formal English. It opens with the date. It names the dead. It thanks the survivors. It commits the country to remembering.

The verb that does that work, in proclamation tradition, is honor. Or remember. Or commemorate. It is a verb that points backwards, at the men in the water at Battleship Row in 1941. It is not a verb that points forward, at a foe to be annihilated in 2025.

I have been a waitress for thirty years. I have served lunch to plenty of men who lost their fathers in the Pacific. I have never heard one of them, on December 7, use the word annihilate. Not once. They use the words those boys. They use the word quiet. Some of them, on the seventh, do not order. They sit. They stir the coffee.

The proclamation, on the federal record, on the seventh, will be read. The verb, in the proclamation, is what it is. The men in the water at Battleship Row, in 1941, are who they always were.

That ought to concern you.