I have to, like, stay on brand, don’t I, and kvetch, right?
I seriously believe that fighting the south’s secession was a mistake as their winning of the peace has proven. That said, I a knowledge that business interests needed the nation united.
As for that winning the peace: Query whether there’s been magnitudes more deaths from how the peace has played out, so top speak, than from the war.
Too, that letting victory slip away is, like, an ur example of how we libs keep treating a won battle as a won war. Complacency R us.
That whined, I’ll acknowledge that we have the freedom to enjoy a three day weekend, so go to it y’all. Have a good one.
Complacency? Maybe. Or maybe naivete--our belief that most people are primarily rational. Dems say, "Here's what we'll give you to make your life better." Republicans say, "Here's whom we'll help you hate." We think the first choice is obviously more appealing, and that the second is just as obviously bad for your health, your kids, and--if you believe in such things--your soul. Then we look up and can't quite believe that 70 million people voted for Trump *the second time.*
The notion that human beings are primarily driven by rational self-interest should have died with Trump's election in 2016, but it's a stubborn thing, especially in the minds of Democratic politicians.
No, identity is the thing, more powerful than self-interest, more powerful even than the instinct for self-preservation. We all know this, just look at the Ukrainians under fire in a trench outside Bakhmut when they could be living comfortably in Poland.
There’s something about Elite Liberal Brain that loves excruciatingly detailed policies and white papers. It’s like they think the average person loves reading law review articles and chuckling knowingly over the footnotes. And if they don’t? Well, they *should*, and we’re going to keep doing things our way until they become as enlightened as us. The Meritocrats!
People tend to get a bit shirty when you invade their country for bullshit reasons, especially a country like Ukraine that's been trying to be an independent nation and keeps getting swatted down by Russia.
I’m not sure there’s any specific reason other than maybe temperament. They’re willing to fight endlessly and play the long game and we’re not. Beyond that, I’m sure there’s a bunch of reasons. Personally, I like to attribute it to an extractive system that tires then narcotizes the masses too much to get a clue and be non-compliant.
Yes, Persistence In Stupidity is their superpower. I'm particularly impressed by their ability to create a phrase that takes on a life of its own, divorced from any evidence or facts. The most famous example of this being "Her emails!" spoken with sincere outrage be people who couldn't tell you a single thing about what it actually means. I'm seeing this now in "Failed Biden policies!", where it's important - make that essential - that you never, under any circumstances, mention any actual policies and how they've failed. I mean, if you want to argue Biden has failed to respond adequately to climate change, I'm right there with you, but I don't think that's what these guys are getting at. Just repeat "Failed Biden" over and over and over till it wears a groove in the brain of the true believers, and you can trust that a good portion of our brain-dead political punditing class will pick it up too: "Can Joe Biden save his failed Presidency?"
Sometimes I think we should have let the South go in 1861 too -- but would consign another 2-4 generations of black Americans to slavery, hands down. The war was a perfectly correct thing for black Americans. And American multiculturalism became without a doubt the most exciting cultural force of the 20th century. No Civil War -- then do we get Little Richard and Chuck Berry? Maybe, but if not, then how do we get Elvis or The Beatles or Grandmaster Flash? That's a poorer world -- and then consider: Which side does a segregated or possibly still slave-holding CSA join in the World Wars? We were right to fight. We should have been a lot more thorough in Reconstruction -- that was the mistake. Rutherford B. Hayes, you really fucked America for 150 years.
You’re probably correct and now I’m sad to be wrong. The CSA would maintain chattel slavery as policy for at least a couple more decades til machinery would make slavery too expensive. Then there’d be Jim Crow continuing til now.
There was also the fact that the North could not let an independent Confederate nation control the Mississippi River. The prosperity of the Midwest -- really, everything west of the Appalachians -- depended on shipping agricultural and mining production.
This being America, our entire national psyche is geared toward both forgetting and remembering.
Forgetting the ACTUAL Enlightenment principles and values that helped found this country, substituting ersatz and slogans in their place. Forgetting the actual sacrifices of men and women down through the centuries of American history. Forgetting how bad things were, and how we have acted collectively to make things better.
And remembering the things that divide us, that make us hate and envy our neighbors. For far too many Americans, there is no slight too slight to be forgotten. We remember The Lost Cause, and too many embrace it as though IT was the moral right. We remember that White men once reigned supreme, and far too many are fighting to keep it that way.
Happy Memorial Day. Don't forget to hit our White Sale, and throw another Constitution on the barbecue.
The Market in many situations _depends_ on substitution as a viable option when the original Thing becomes too hard to get, and here as often I'll hold that taking the Market as normative is the problem.
(This is a way, way aside sidebar: A few months ago I watched The Awful Truth (1937) and after a clunky first 10 minutes it becomes one of the funniest movies I've ever seen -- point being, I almost choked on my ginger ale just now at "you're well out of it" as my brain reflexively read it with Cary Grant's delivery of the line "She's well out of it" -- and saw Irene Dunne's facial twitch in response as they sit with Ralph Bellamy smiling cluelessly. I recommend this movie -- I suppose ymmv, but it was a revelation to me how funny Grant was, since I grew up more on the elder statesman Grant of Hitchcock movies.)
Every REBID comment section needs at least one movie reference (I'd prefer *old* movie reference, but I won't be a stickler for that.) Anyway, thanks for doing your part.
My favorite early Grant was when he was asked by Hepburn's aunt why he was running around in women's clothing, specifically a flimsy feathery robe-like thingie (long story, see "Bringing Up Baby" for that) and he leapt in a manspreadingly wide-legged way as he shouted "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!"
Which was then and is to this day to my knowledge the earliest public use of the term that way. I have not looked any deeper into it because I love my little dream of discovery.
While we're remembering, I think my favorite scene in that movie is when he and Hepburn are singing to try and get the leopard down off the roof, and then, surprisingly, Grant starts to sing harmony, then the dog joins in, then the leopard, it's just a wonderful scene, reliably makes me laugh. But it's Grant who's the best in it, something about finding yourself in a ridiculous situation and going all-in (what the kids these days call "commit to the bit.") And that was Grant, a guy who could have easily gotten by on his looks but was willing to try anything, even the silliest slapstick, and put everything he had into it. Think I'll go watch that again.
David Blight, in “Race and Reunión,” traces Memorial Day back to 1865 when Blacks in Charleston, SC, buried and memorialized Union soldiers who died in a Confederate POW camp there.
I'm afraid I'm completely frivolous about Memorial Day. In the nursery business we start counting down to the days till Memorial Day sometime in late March. It's usually the first time since December that we can take 2 days off in a row. Beach,here I come.* I actually don't go to the beach. I get caught up with all the chores around here. Many, some what ironically, horticulture related. I never put a garden in until the end of May.
I guess I'm a little weak on the patriotism thing too. Except for that one Good War
( which I have some doubts about) I'm with Smedley Butler, Kurt Vonnegut and especially Edwin Starr.
Good God, Y all.
* I'm dictating this- the first time I said it, the dictation Ap
offered up " B**** here I come!" I wanted to leave it but that would have been confusing.
I have to wonder what Memorial Day would be like if we had a vacation and time-off tradition like they do in most of Europe. When I was in the regular work-force (retail or administrative office jobs, mostly), I rarely took actual vacations. It was just too difficult getting coverage, coming home and working extra to catch up, asserting your right to be gone for two weeks when the pressure was to not make things hard for the company and your co-workers.
Surely that was largely a me problem, but I think a lot of Americans feel a similar pressure, so we want to cram things into three day weekends - chores as well as recreation, or maybe ask for Thursday and Friday off too, to simulate an actual vacation, woo hoo.
I haven't ever traveled to Germany, but I understand that shoppers have to plan ahead because most stores and shops close down on Sunday. America never closes its stores, and many of its service workers rarely get a holiday off. We don't make much time for somber reflection.
I don't know who I hate worse - Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A. Yet, I think it's cool as hell they close Sundays. I think most everybody should.( Except bars and liquor stores. Sunday afternoons are pretty good time to have a drink.)
A few years back my wife and I started making a circuit of the cemeteries where many of my family and friends are buried, planting a small flower in the vicinity of each. It’s a nice way to spend some time and it does bring up some good memories. I know it started as a military thing, but it’s morphed into more of a family thing, albeit for the living with their grills and coolers full of Bud , ummm Coors Lights and other poisons for the kids, but I don’t see that as much more a good thing than bad.
Regarding AA, which is pretty much just a quack religion, I wouldn’t put to much stock in their advice. The real reason the founder was able to kick was because he dropped a lot of acid, which science is no confirming as a good strategy.
Anyhoo, happy holiday to you all, too. And if I may make a humble suggestion, use it as a holiday from politics and lost causes and white sales and spend some time with loved ones, if possible, and take at least a little time to contemplate the memories of loved ones who have passed.
That was very thoughtful and informed. Great stuff! BTW, if I wrote a civics textbook, it would begin with Lesson 1: never join a violent mob to storm a government building unless you want to get your dumb ass shot.
The War of Southern Aggression, as I put it, because rebel forces seized Federal armories, bases, and installations, paid for by all American taxpayers North and South.
Very well said. Maya Lin's Vietnam design is a -memorial-, like the Day is supposed to be, and not a -monument-, which is why Reagan and James Watt tried to prevent the project from being realized. Unfortunately for them, it was completely funded by people, not monsters in government. Speaking of which, if God doesn't prove He exists and kill the bastard today, tomorrow the world is about to endure the celebration of the 100th birthday of someone probably responsible for more names etched on memorials around the globe than any other living monster. Considering that a savage thug like Putin exists that's saying something.
Great news, Kissinger's 100th falls on a Saturday, so no chance for the Morning Joe crew to turn my stomach with their encomiums! Who says there isn't a God?
This was lovely, Roy - thanks. I also find Memorial Day an unsettling holiday tradition. Especially that I now live so close to the Jersey shore. Something about all those fat dudes sporting their US flag board shorts & beach towels that seems contradictory. "Celebrate the military sacrifices of Americans by rubbing the US flag in the crack of your ass!"
One aspect missing from our collective historical memory of war-farin' in the USA is the working-class resistance to conscription (& even being expected to volunteer). During the Civil War, there were riots in NYC over it (which as should be expected, took on a racist cast). And there was the big tent city outside DC in 1932, of veterans protesting their delayed bonuses from WW1 (which almost turned into a fascist takeover of the USA).
I mean, I know why they don't want us to know all that -- but we should take pains to remember on our own.
Happy 3-day weekend, y'all. Every good joke comes in threes, dontcha know.
Just thinking about how Abbie Hoffman was arrested about fifty years ago for daring to demean ***THE FLAG*** by wearing a shirt of it. And now, while dopes shout about THESE COLORS DON'T RUN, Walmart sells napkins with the American flag printed on them, that will be used by those same dopes to wipe BBQ sauce off their faces and then be thrown in the trash.
Couple of days ago I was stuck in traffic behind a pickup that had on its back window: "Stomp on my flag I'll stomp your ass." Made me laugh because just that morning I had come under aerial attack from a red-wing blackbird who seemed to think I was after HIS tree. Dude, I don't want your tree, I don't want your flag, just calm the fuck down.
Just a heads up that we returned from Cape May today – there's a whole messa folks headed your way (you probly already knew that; I was just stunned by how many we passed goin' the other way).
Madison knows how to do it up right. Vets for Peace has the Memorial Mile, tombstones for each of the soldiers killed in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures (takes a LOT of volunteers to set up that many tombstones). And then a nice service at Gates of Heaven Synagogue in James Madison Park, this year Matt Rothschild from Wisconsin Democracy Campaign is speaking, plus Dave Couper, our former Chief of Police turned Episcopal Priest and poet (what, you don't have one of those?).
I like that quote from Milan Kundera: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." So however and whatever you remember, please do. Hell, if you even just want to remember more than a million people in this country just died of Covid, I salute you.
I still like to go to the cemetery observances when I can. Even all the way out here in a little town on the California coast, you can find the graves of those who are remembered for their service in the civil war. There is a place name here that I didn’t realize was the name of a beloved local character who made his way out west as a freedman after the war until I found stumbled across his grave and read the little plaque about him.
Not to speak for our northern neighbors, but for the very best in remembrance practice, head to eastern Canada. Every tiny Atlantic coastal village has a Great War memorial to the local lads, usually along the coastal road, overlooking the ocean. Newfoundland has a bunch of them. I stopped at everyone when I rode around there a couple years back.
The eastern coastal towns suffered higher death rates than most other places, if I remember right. Some of the memorials also added WW2 names, and there are also memorials to the lost-at-sea. Several those towns were/are so small even a single death was a significance. And often one finds several entries with the same last name.
If memorials are supposed to make one remember, those are succeeding.
America has always been the land of the 2nd chance, a place to lit out for the territories and wipe the slate clean, to be washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn, usually with a new name and credit history. Memory is an unwelcome guest at that banquet, so it's usually an indulgence of the successful and powerful as much as a testimony to sacrifice. Hypocrisy was a necessary founding virtue to support the dream of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as implemented from the Original Specification, so we are capable of honoring and forgetting the dead at the same time, much as we Honor the Troops and tell them to sign up for food stamps, and offer thoughts and prayers for children who die for the hallucinatory dream of the ability to overthrow the government at will.
So, memory, the unreliable narrator, is our hope that we can choose Good over the far more comfortable Evil, though the evidence is thin. But not nonexistent. So there's that. And as my Mom, a Depression baby raised on a farm used to say, "Don't throw that out! It's still good! You can use that!". That's Memorial Day.
Fun thing is, your Mom's philosophy works with both physical items and with ideas. I think we're partially in the situation we are because we're so quick to toss out ideas as "old" when we should be thinking how they're applicable to the present day.
"washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn, usually with a new name and credit history. " a lot of our trouble is that you absolutely can't escape corporate and government scrutiny anymore -- so hypocrisy is the only escape left.
Yeah, I thought about that, but left it in. You don't just give up a punch line because it's old. It's still good! I can use it! That loss of the long-standing freedom from accountability is one of the root things driving Real America insane, I think, at a sort of subconscious level. I'm convinced they really really hate modern society in general, and the way media keeps rubbing their nose in it, but there's a fundamental insecurity and fear underneath, maybe the fear that they will be held accountable for the sins of the fathers with no way out.
Yes! I think about this a lot too. How many of the Old West movies feature a character who has come to the frontier to reinvent himself completely? A friend's dad did it too, ditched one life completely in 1968, moved two cities away, started a new life with no attachment to the old. For sure, the "new selves' invented Out West in 1879 or two towns over in 1968 could mean whole families abandoned back home (and did, in the '68 case). That's not great! But it must be a terrible sea change in the national psyche that we have cut off all avenues of escape. The Old West served a Biblical purpose, if I have my mythology right: You could go there to redeem yourself, and American-style do it through nothing but your own effort. It is not clear in our fully surveilled and more closeknit world how a person does that, or if it can be done.
My older relatives used to call it Decoration Day. My great-aunt and grandma used to take us kids with them on pilgrimages to the local cemeteries before the holiday to clean the graves of relatives and put out flowers.
Also, I can’t remember how many times I had to read In Flanders Field and play Taps at the local cemetery observances. (I don’t claim to have done it well, but when it’s a tiny community and you’re one of the few available…)
As far as history and remembering - what the right wants to do is treat the past as nothing more than a list of names and dates, something to be memorized but not thought about too deeply. They're not concerned about learning from our mistakes in the past, because they don't acknowledge any. America has never sinned, it's an innocent place that's been trying to mind its business but Dark Forces From Outside have been fouling things up. We just need to be pure and vigilant and not ask troublesome questions that might make someone feel bad.
Also, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was and is a disgrace. Sure, I like long weekends as much as anybody, but the meanings of the holidays have gotten swamped by furniture sales.
I have to, like, stay on brand, don’t I, and kvetch, right?
I seriously believe that fighting the south’s secession was a mistake as their winning of the peace has proven. That said, I a knowledge that business interests needed the nation united.
As for that winning the peace: Query whether there’s been magnitudes more deaths from how the peace has played out, so top speak, than from the war.
Too, that letting victory slip away is, like, an ur example of how we libs keep treating a won battle as a won war. Complacency R us.
That whined, I’ll acknowledge that we have the freedom to enjoy a three day weekend, so go to it y’all. Have a good one.
Complacency? Maybe. Or maybe naivete--our belief that most people are primarily rational. Dems say, "Here's what we'll give you to make your life better." Republicans say, "Here's whom we'll help you hate." We think the first choice is obviously more appealing, and that the second is just as obviously bad for your health, your kids, and--if you believe in such things--your soul. Then we look up and can't quite believe that 70 million people voted for Trump *the second time.*
The notion that human beings are primarily driven by rational self-interest should have died with Trump's election in 2016, but it's a stubborn thing, especially in the minds of Democratic politicians.
No, identity is the thing, more powerful than self-interest, more powerful even than the instinct for self-preservation. We all know this, just look at the Ukrainians under fire in a trench outside Bakhmut when they could be living comfortably in Poland.
There’s something about Elite Liberal Brain that loves excruciatingly detailed policies and white papers. It’s like they think the average person loves reading law review articles and chuckling knowingly over the footnotes. And if they don’t? Well, they *should*, and we’re going to keep doing things our way until they become as enlightened as us. The Meritocrats!
2 marks for Meritocrats
It's really a fight between the Techno and Merito wings of the -crats family.
All watched over by Aristocrats of of laughing grease...?
People tend to get a bit shirty when you invade their country for bullshit reasons, especially a country like Ukraine that's been trying to be an independent nation and keeps getting swatted down by Russia.
I’m not sure there’s any specific reason other than maybe temperament. They’re willing to fight endlessly and play the long game and we’re not. Beyond that, I’m sure there’s a bunch of reasons. Personally, I like to attribute it to an extractive system that tires then narcotizes the masses too much to get a clue and be non-compliant.
But again, I’m sure there’s no one reason.
Yes, Persistence In Stupidity is their superpower. I'm particularly impressed by their ability to create a phrase that takes on a life of its own, divorced from any evidence or facts. The most famous example of this being "Her emails!" spoken with sincere outrage be people who couldn't tell you a single thing about what it actually means. I'm seeing this now in "Failed Biden policies!", where it's important - make that essential - that you never, under any circumstances, mention any actual policies and how they've failed. I mean, if you want to argue Biden has failed to respond adequately to climate change, I'm right there with you, but I don't think that's what these guys are getting at. Just repeat "Failed Biden" over and over and over till it wears a groove in the brain of the true believers, and you can trust that a good portion of our brain-dead political punditing class will pick it up too: "Can Joe Biden save his failed Presidency?"
I think we have different actors in mind. You’re talking the GOP and I’m thinking more PACs, party actors, etc.
Unpaid laborers probably benefited as swell
Sometimes I think we should have let the South go in 1861 too -- but would consign another 2-4 generations of black Americans to slavery, hands down. The war was a perfectly correct thing for black Americans. And American multiculturalism became without a doubt the most exciting cultural force of the 20th century. No Civil War -- then do we get Little Richard and Chuck Berry? Maybe, but if not, then how do we get Elvis or The Beatles or Grandmaster Flash? That's a poorer world -- and then consider: Which side does a segregated or possibly still slave-holding CSA join in the World Wars? We were right to fight. We should have been a lot more thorough in Reconstruction -- that was the mistake. Rutherford B. Hayes, you really fucked America for 150 years.
You’re probably correct and now I’m sad to be wrong. The CSA would maintain chattel slavery as policy for at least a couple more decades til machinery would make slavery too expensive. Then there’d be Jim Crow continuing til now.
Ever see the mock doc "C.S.A."?
Better than Kentucky Fried Movie!
"Rutherford B. Hayes, you really fucked America for 150 years."
People are recognizing Rutherford B. Hayes more and more for what a fuck-up he was. Sorry, Rutherford, someone had to say it!
"His Fraudulency" as he was known.
There was also the fact that the North could not let an independent Confederate nation control the Mississippi River. The prosperity of the Midwest -- really, everything west of the Appalachians -- depended on shipping agricultural and mining production.
This being America, our entire national psyche is geared toward both forgetting and remembering.
Forgetting the ACTUAL Enlightenment principles and values that helped found this country, substituting ersatz and slogans in their place. Forgetting the actual sacrifices of men and women down through the centuries of American history. Forgetting how bad things were, and how we have acted collectively to make things better.
And remembering the things that divide us, that make us hate and envy our neighbors. For far too many Americans, there is no slight too slight to be forgotten. We remember The Lost Cause, and too many embrace it as though IT was the moral right. We remember that White men once reigned supreme, and far too many are fighting to keep it that way.
Happy Memorial Day. Don't forget to hit our White Sale, and throw another Constitution on the barbecue.
The Market in many situations _depends_ on substitution as a viable option when the original Thing becomes too hard to get, and here as often I'll hold that taking the Market as normative is the problem.
Friday night here in Japan, and this Canadian is (I think prudently) keeping his mouth shut. Hope you guys enjoy the day off!
Ha! You're well out of it
(This is a way, way aside sidebar: A few months ago I watched The Awful Truth (1937) and after a clunky first 10 minutes it becomes one of the funniest movies I've ever seen -- point being, I almost choked on my ginger ale just now at "you're well out of it" as my brain reflexively read it with Cary Grant's delivery of the line "She's well out of it" -- and saw Irene Dunne's facial twitch in response as they sit with Ralph Bellamy smiling cluelessly. I recommend this movie -- I suppose ymmv, but it was a revelation to me how funny Grant was, since I grew up more on the elder statesman Grant of Hitchcock movies.)
Every REBID comment section needs at least one movie reference (I'd prefer *old* movie reference, but I won't be a stickler for that.) Anyway, thanks for doing your part.
My favorite early Grant was when he was asked by Hepburn's aunt why he was running around in women's clothing, specifically a flimsy feathery robe-like thingie (long story, see "Bringing Up Baby" for that) and he leapt in a manspreadingly wide-legged way as he shouted "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!"
Which was then and is to this day to my knowledge the earliest public use of the term that way. I have not looked any deeper into it because I love my little dream of discovery.
While we're remembering, I think my favorite scene in that movie is when he and Hepburn are singing to try and get the leopard down off the roof, and then, surprisingly, Grant starts to sing harmony, then the dog joins in, then the leopard, it's just a wonderful scene, reliably makes me laugh. But it's Grant who's the best in it, something about finding yourself in a ridiculous situation and going all-in (what the kids these days call "commit to the bit.") And that was Grant, a guy who could have easily gotten by on his looks but was willing to try anything, even the silliest slapstick, and put everything he had into it. Think I'll go watch that again.
Yeah the moment when he gets to "all those things you've always pined for" and gives a little shiver of accomplishment over that harmony...
Irene Dunne is one of my favorite actresses, and it goes without saying that Cary Grant is always wonderful.
I would pay money to watch Irene Dunn and Myrna Loy give their side-eyes to Cary Grant and William Powell.
David Blight, in “Race and Reunión,” traces Memorial Day back to 1865 when Blacks in Charleston, SC, buried and memorialized Union soldiers who died in a Confederate POW camp there.
I was just dropping in to mention this very thing... http://www.davidwblight.com/public-history/2015/4/27/the-first-decoration-day-newark-star-ledger
I'm afraid I'm completely frivolous about Memorial Day. In the nursery business we start counting down to the days till Memorial Day sometime in late March. It's usually the first time since December that we can take 2 days off in a row. Beach,here I come.* I actually don't go to the beach. I get caught up with all the chores around here. Many, some what ironically, horticulture related. I never put a garden in until the end of May.
I guess I'm a little weak on the patriotism thing too. Except for that one Good War
( which I have some doubts about) I'm with Smedley Butler, Kurt Vonnegut and especially Edwin Starr.
Good God, Y all.
* I'm dictating this- the first time I said it, the dictation Ap
offered up " B**** here I come!" I wanted to leave it but that would have been confusing.
I have to wonder what Memorial Day would be like if we had a vacation and time-off tradition like they do in most of Europe. When I was in the regular work-force (retail or administrative office jobs, mostly), I rarely took actual vacations. It was just too difficult getting coverage, coming home and working extra to catch up, asserting your right to be gone for two weeks when the pressure was to not make things hard for the company and your co-workers.
Surely that was largely a me problem, but I think a lot of Americans feel a similar pressure, so we want to cram things into three day weekends - chores as well as recreation, or maybe ask for Thursday and Friday off too, to simulate an actual vacation, woo hoo.
I haven't ever traveled to Germany, but I understand that shoppers have to plan ahead because most stores and shops close down on Sunday. America never closes its stores, and many of its service workers rarely get a holiday off. We don't make much time for somber reflection.
I don't know who I hate worse - Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A. Yet, I think it's cool as hell they close Sundays. I think most everybody should.( Except bars and liquor stores. Sunday afternoons are pretty good time to have a drink.)
A few years back my wife and I started making a circuit of the cemeteries where many of my family and friends are buried, planting a small flower in the vicinity of each. It’s a nice way to spend some time and it does bring up some good memories. I know it started as a military thing, but it’s morphed into more of a family thing, albeit for the living with their grills and coolers full of Bud , ummm Coors Lights and other poisons for the kids, but I don’t see that as much more a good thing than bad.
Regarding AA, which is pretty much just a quack religion, I wouldn’t put to much stock in their advice. The real reason the founder was able to kick was because he dropped a lot of acid, which science is no confirming as a good strategy.
Anyhoo, happy holiday to you all, too. And if I may make a humble suggestion, use it as a holiday from politics and lost causes and white sales and spend some time with loved ones, if possible, and take at least a little time to contemplate the memories of loved ones who have passed.
That was very thoughtful and informed. Great stuff! BTW, if I wrote a civics textbook, it would begin with Lesson 1: never join a violent mob to storm a government building unless you want to get your dumb ass shot.
President Jeff Davis promised everyone a pardon, but that didn't work out.
Yeah. And the Union promised alla them southron wimmins 40 acres and a male. Same story.
The War of Southern Aggression, as I put it, because rebel forces seized Federal armories, bases, and installations, paid for by all American taxpayers North and South.
Very well said. Maya Lin's Vietnam design is a -memorial-, like the Day is supposed to be, and not a -monument-, which is why Reagan and James Watt tried to prevent the project from being realized. Unfortunately for them, it was completely funded by people, not monsters in government. Speaking of which, if God doesn't prove He exists and kill the bastard today, tomorrow the world is about to endure the celebration of the 100th birthday of someone probably responsible for more names etched on memorials around the globe than any other living monster. Considering that a savage thug like Putin exists that's saying something.
Thanks for the reminder, definitely need to avoid the Morning Joe for that one.
Great news, Kissinger's 100th falls on a Saturday, so no chance for the Morning Joe crew to turn my stomach with their encomiums! Who says there isn't a God?
Joe, mourning...
This was lovely, Roy - thanks. I also find Memorial Day an unsettling holiday tradition. Especially that I now live so close to the Jersey shore. Something about all those fat dudes sporting their US flag board shorts & beach towels that seems contradictory. "Celebrate the military sacrifices of Americans by rubbing the US flag in the crack of your ass!"
One aspect missing from our collective historical memory of war-farin' in the USA is the working-class resistance to conscription (& even being expected to volunteer). During the Civil War, there were riots in NYC over it (which as should be expected, took on a racist cast). And there was the big tent city outside DC in 1932, of veterans protesting their delayed bonuses from WW1 (which almost turned into a fascist takeover of the USA).
I mean, I know why they don't want us to know all that -- but we should take pains to remember on our own.
Happy 3-day weekend, y'all. Every good joke comes in threes, dontcha know.
Just thinking about how Abbie Hoffman was arrested about fifty years ago for daring to demean ***THE FLAG*** by wearing a shirt of it. And now, while dopes shout about THESE COLORS DON'T RUN, Walmart sells napkins with the American flag printed on them, that will be used by those same dopes to wipe BBQ sauce off their faces and then be thrown in the trash.
Couple of days ago I was stuck in traffic behind a pickup that had on its back window: "Stomp on my flag I'll stomp your ass." Made me laugh because just that morning I had come under aerial attack from a red-wing blackbird who seemed to think I was after HIS tree. Dude, I don't want your tree, I don't want your flag, just calm the fuck down.
Just a heads up that we returned from Cape May today – there's a whole messa folks headed your way (you probly already knew that; I was just stunned by how many we passed goin' the other way).
Madison knows how to do it up right. Vets for Peace has the Memorial Mile, tombstones for each of the soldiers killed in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures (takes a LOT of volunteers to set up that many tombstones). And then a nice service at Gates of Heaven Synagogue in James Madison Park, this year Matt Rothschild from Wisconsin Democracy Campaign is speaking, plus Dave Couper, our former Chief of Police turned Episcopal Priest and poet (what, you don't have one of those?).
I like that quote from Milan Kundera: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." So however and whatever you remember, please do. Hell, if you even just want to remember more than a million people in this country just died of Covid, I salute you.
I still like to go to the cemetery observances when I can. Even all the way out here in a little town on the California coast, you can find the graves of those who are remembered for their service in the civil war. There is a place name here that I didn’t realize was the name of a beloved local character who made his way out west as a freedman after the war until I found stumbled across his grave and read the little plaque about him.
Not to speak for our northern neighbors, but for the very best in remembrance practice, head to eastern Canada. Every tiny Atlantic coastal village has a Great War memorial to the local lads, usually along the coastal road, overlooking the ocean. Newfoundland has a bunch of them. I stopped at everyone when I rode around there a couple years back.
The eastern coastal towns suffered higher death rates than most other places, if I remember right. Some of the memorials also added WW2 names, and there are also memorials to the lost-at-sea. Several those towns were/are so small even a single death was a significance. And often one finds several entries with the same last name.
If memorials are supposed to make one remember, those are succeeding.
America has always been the land of the 2nd chance, a place to lit out for the territories and wipe the slate clean, to be washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn, usually with a new name and credit history. Memory is an unwelcome guest at that banquet, so it's usually an indulgence of the successful and powerful as much as a testimony to sacrifice. Hypocrisy was a necessary founding virtue to support the dream of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as implemented from the Original Specification, so we are capable of honoring and forgetting the dead at the same time, much as we Honor the Troops and tell them to sign up for food stamps, and offer thoughts and prayers for children who die for the hallucinatory dream of the ability to overthrow the government at will.
So, memory, the unreliable narrator, is our hope that we can choose Good over the far more comfortable Evil, though the evidence is thin. But not nonexistent. So there's that. And as my Mom, a Depression baby raised on a farm used to say, "Don't throw that out! It's still good! You can use that!". That's Memorial Day.
Fun thing is, your Mom's philosophy works with both physical items and with ideas. I think we're partially in the situation we are because we're so quick to toss out ideas as "old" when we should be thinking how they're applicable to the present day.
"washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn, usually with a new name and credit history. " a lot of our trouble is that you absolutely can't escape corporate and government scrutiny anymore -- so hypocrisy is the only escape left.
Yeah, I thought about that, but left it in. You don't just give up a punch line because it's old. It's still good! I can use it! That loss of the long-standing freedom from accountability is one of the root things driving Real America insane, I think, at a sort of subconscious level. I'm convinced they really really hate modern society in general, and the way media keeps rubbing their nose in it, but there's a fundamental insecurity and fear underneath, maybe the fear that they will be held accountable for the sins of the fathers with no way out.
Yes! I think about this a lot too. How many of the Old West movies feature a character who has come to the frontier to reinvent himself completely? A friend's dad did it too, ditched one life completely in 1968, moved two cities away, started a new life with no attachment to the old. For sure, the "new selves' invented Out West in 1879 or two towns over in 1968 could mean whole families abandoned back home (and did, in the '68 case). That's not great! But it must be a terrible sea change in the national psyche that we have cut off all avenues of escape. The Old West served a Biblical purpose, if I have my mythology right: You could go there to redeem yourself, and American-style do it through nothing but your own effort. It is not clear in our fully surveilled and more closeknit world how a person does that, or if it can be done.
"you absolutely can't escape corporate and government scrutiny anymore -- so hypocrisy is the only escape left."
Have you written about this before? Seems like this deserves to be a longer piece.
My older relatives used to call it Decoration Day. My great-aunt and grandma used to take us kids with them on pilgrimages to the local cemeteries before the holiday to clean the graves of relatives and put out flowers.
Also, I can’t remember how many times I had to read In Flanders Field and play Taps at the local cemetery observances. (I don’t claim to have done it well, but when it’s a tiny community and you’re one of the few available…)
As far as history and remembering - what the right wants to do is treat the past as nothing more than a list of names and dates, something to be memorized but not thought about too deeply. They're not concerned about learning from our mistakes in the past, because they don't acknowledge any. America has never sinned, it's an innocent place that's been trying to mind its business but Dark Forces From Outside have been fouling things up. We just need to be pure and vigilant and not ask troublesome questions that might make someone feel bad.
Exactly, this is how a phrase like "America isn't broken, it's just unfinished" gets classified as "Hate Speech."
Exactly. America is finished! Everything's fine! We're pure and good and moral! We can only ever be sinned against!
(Sort of off topic: over/under on when "Fahrenheit 451" will be banned in Florida. I've got sometime next week.)
Do they know there's an actual sex scene in 1984? I know they haven't read it, so nobody tell them, OK?
They must know – how else explain all those kids born in 1985!
Couldn't agree more.
Also, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was and is a disgrace. Sure, I like long weekends as much as anybody, but the meanings of the holidays have gotten swamped by furniture sales.