I was personally liking more and more the idea of Juneteenth, liberation at the end of war rather than the beginning, and the holiday of the Second Founding beginning with the 13th Amendment, when we tried turning the Republic into a democracy, but we haven't got a working set of rituals or a place for white people to show up saying, humbly, I'd like to celebrate too, and little belief at the moment that anything really changed anyway. So the Fourth is still something.
Oh, now they're gonna be REALLY mad, army bases named after Confederates proposed to be named after an African-American Medal of Honor Winner, among others.
"the grand old ensign… stood up and the west wind kissed it as the sergeant sloped its lance,”
The one thing I'll give Ken Burns any credit for is showing us just how literate alot of average Joes( and Janes!) were back in the olden days.
( I hate Ken Burns because his highly homogenized brand of history becomes conventional wisdom once he's given it the big budget white guy conventional wisdom PBS treatment. )( I hated "Jazz")
Happy Holiday.! The yokels went to town last night- much money's were spent at Freedom Fireworks ( World's Largest!) (How can every Fireworks store be the World's Largest? )
I begin day 3 of a 9 day remodeling blitz. Here's some advice - if you ever get the urge to build a restaurant style booth in your kitchen and figure you can just cut an old church pew in half to do it - don't .
It's upholstered. Cutting it was a challenge. Cut the fabric. Cut the
Pad.Pull it back out of the way. Cut the wood frame. Return the pad. Pull the fabric back over it and staple it. It was do - able. . The hardest part was getting up the nerve. The main problem is pews have a closed end- like a chair. Booths are open sided so you can slide in. I couldn't cut the side down - least ways so it didn,'t look like I was angry at it. I ended up removing g the side completely forcing me to reinforce the back and the seat enough so you could sit in it and it won,'t come apart. This involves steel bars, brackets. Complicated hidden braces. Jesus Christ. At this point I just want you get it done and really don't give a fuck what it looks like. A liberating feeling. that. Usually when you get to that point you figure out later it looks fine and you were just too close to the work to ever be happy with it.
I didn’t care for Burns’s “Jazz”, either. Too much Wynton Marsalis. Wynton’s outlook on jazz is reactionary, dismissing anything that doesn’t comport with his idea about what jazz should be. All that footage of Wynton scatting made me turn to another station.
Roy, this is fantastic, I’d say you should write speeches but since 97% of politicians are a waste of space, I think your talents are better served elsewhere. But your talent certainly deserves a broader audience than this newsletter affords it.
If the New York Times can publish guest opinions that boil down to “Isn’t SCOTUS overturning Roe just a response to Black people demonstrating about the police killing them, really?” it’s journalistic malpractice no one has given you an opinion column of your own.
I kind of feel celebrating this year is like the meme says: "you take away my rights and now you want me to go to your birthday party?" But perhaps, just maybe, better times are coming, and in any event my grilling skills will soon be required. So Happy 4th, all.
Can't remember whether it was the Post or the Times, but one of them had an op-ed yesterday, something like "Prosecuting Trump Will Tear America Apart." Not too far away, in a somewhat related story, a map shows abortion illegal in 26 states, legal in the remaining 24, an almost-perfect 50-50 divide. Yeah, it would be a real shame if we did something as "divisive" as prosecuting Trump.
I don't Twitter, so thanks for the link to ASO. My much older brother retired as a Lt. Col. in the Army Reserves and is a well-read amateur military historian; and when my boys were growing up he took them and me to Harper's Ferry and several Civil War battlefields, describing and explaining all the way. As we approached Gettysburg, he turned to face the boys and said, "Now imagine you're a teenager who's never been away from home before, marching down a dusty road in the hot July sun in a wool uniform carrying an 8 lb. rifle, anxious and scared about "seeing the elephant" for the first time...." ASO is almost as good. ; )
I have a great grand-uncle buried on Cemetery Ridge, and my cousin has our great-grandfather's Civil War diary. Unfortunately, not all soldiers in the Civil War were as eloquent as the ones you quote. I was very excited to see that diary (about the size of a deck of cards, only a third as thick), but the laconic, mundane entries were usually one sentence: "Stood picket today," "Got paid today," etc. The most exciting one read, "President Lincoln reviewed the troops today —" and that was it. Nothing about what he saw or thought or felt. I should get better ancestors.
Having been to those battlefields has made it harder for me to countenance the sight of the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag, because I've stood near Bloody Lane at Antietam, and imagined it filled with mangled, dead and dying men covered in gore. Especially when that flag is adopted by Northerners — our ancestors, those men who fought there, how can we disrespect their memories like this?
I used to like fireworks when I was a kid, all the way through adolescence and young adulthood. Now, in my golden years, I fail to see the point of, to understand the pleasure derived from, or any aesthetic experience provided by amateur fireworks — with the exception of displays by truly talented amateurs, none of which l have been privy to in the last decade or so. Professional fireworks, on the other hand, can be thrilling and beautiful.
But the mini bombs and rockets set off by the nabes in the hood are invisible. No rocket’s red glare. They are mostly loud thumps repeating through the night, with occasional sizzles and whooshes punctuating them. It went on last night into early this morning; I don’t look forward to what it will be like tonight, on the actual holiday. My dog, the sweetest, friendliest dog in the world, hates fireworks and if she knew the people responsible for those awful sounds, she would hate them, too.
But I’m glad today’s Breakdown wasn’t a total paean to amateur pyrotechnics. The passage from Haskell’s diary strikes me as poetic and I’m grateful for having an opportunity to read it. And in writing about the time of the civil war rather than the usual adulation of the founding fathers, we get the perspective Americans who defended the nation against the assault brought by other Americans, led by traitors who thought their racist ideology and way of life justified a fucking war. The outcome of the Civil War advanced the idea that equality of people extended to other than white men. That’s well worth celebrating, and if my neighbors want to celebrate it with miniature ordnance and artillery, My dog and I will survive.
This is terrific, Roy, as usual on such occasions. For the sheer fun of it, here's Charles Ives "Fourth of July". It's got more than a dozen All-American tunes, overlapping marching bands, and fireworks!
For anyone interested, here's what Ives wrote about it:
"It's a boy's '4th—no historical orations—no patriotic grandiloquences by 'grown-ups'—no program in his yard! But he knows what he's celebrating—better than most of the county politicians. And he goes at it in his own way, with a patriotism nearer kin to nature than jingoism. His festivities start in quiet of the midnight before, and grow raucous with the sun. Everybody knows what it's like—if everybody doesn't—Cannon on the Green, Village Band on Main Street, fire crackers, shanks mixed on cornets, strings around big toes, torpedoes, Church bells, lost finger, fifes, clam-chowder, a prize-fight, drum-corps, burnt shins, parades (in and out of step), saloons all closed (more drunks than usual), baseball game (Danbury All-Stars vs Beaver Brook Boys), pistols, mobbed umpire, Red, White, and Blue runaway horse,—and the day ends with the sky-rocket over the Church-steeple, just after the annual explosion sets the Town-Hall on fire.
Ives said it was both abstract music and a program piece, your choice. More Ives:
"I remember distinctly, when I was scoring this, that there was a feeling of freedom as a boy has, on the Fourth of July, who wants to do anything he wants to do, and that’s his one day to do it. And I wrote this, feeling free to remember local things etc., and to put [in] as many feelings and rhythms as I wanted to put together. And I did what I wanted to, quite sure that the thing would never be played, and perhaps could never be played—although the uneven measures that look so complicated in the score are mostly caused by missing a beat, which was often done in parades."
Maybe we should be pondering what state of the nation will be in the next couple of years.
For eons, the idea was was that all the conservatives want is a strong military — presumably for handouts — and otherwise $$$$ for the special interests and nothing more than that. And it looks like that’s inevitable, coming sooner rather than later, and with efforts to weaken and subvert the power of the vote, I can’t see it changing in my lifetime unless, I’d course, in some miracle, it’s prevented.
But more germane lay, that said there, no matter the state of the nation, fireworks are great, the more the better 🎇🎆🧨🧨🧨🧨🧨
When I was a kid we lived for awhile in Buffalo, NY where as in all NY you can't do fireworks. My folks would take us camping on the beach in Canada where we could both purchase and shoot off firecrackers. In my memory it always rained and my sister's air mattress always deflated on the rock that was under it. What I never took in before was the irony that we crossed over into Canada on the Peace Bridge to celebrate this great American holiday.
Our youngest spent July 3-4 at a classmate’s family cabin. Asked how it was, he said it was “The most American cabin I’ve ever been in.” Of course, we needed details. “It’s really 70’s with carpet everywhere, even the bathroom, and there are four deer heads on the wall and when it rained, water dripped from the ceiling into a pot while we played blackjack.” He also said the friends family was “nice but racist fucks” and a 26 year female cousin was dating a 16 year old, so kind of a groomer. But he got to go swimming in the lake and ride in a boat and shoot off fireworks. Would he to go back? “Nah, we left early when her uncle said it was upsetting grandma because my girlfriend and I were hugging.”
Sorry, no. The fireworks people are selfish shitbags, and after many years of trying unsuccessfully to comfort my terrified dogs for a week on either side of the Fourth, I hope they all die soon.
I no longer much believe in "reality" so am not much affected by your martial turn. Some old part of me sympathizes or empathizes or destabilizes or something but I don't really see how any of it much matters. My advice to the kids is to run as fast from this shit as they can. but as yet they only understand it intellectually, not deep down in their souls, so like you they think things could conceivably get better or that by fighting the power they stand some chance of winning. Hopefully they snap out of it and marry a French person or Canadian or the like before it's too late. I feel like Marlon Brando puttering around the garden. I did my crimes and can now commune with the birds and the bees and the green living things. There's really not much they can do to me, nor much reason that they should. But yea, in my opinion, the young should flee, not fight the power.
I was personally liking more and more the idea of Juneteenth, liberation at the end of war rather than the beginning, and the holiday of the Second Founding beginning with the 13th Amendment, when we tried turning the Republic into a democracy, but we haven't got a working set of rituals or a place for white people to show up saying, humbly, I'd like to celebrate too, and little belief at the moment that anything really changed anyway. So the Fourth is still something.
Oh, now they're gonna be REALLY mad, army bases named after Confederates proposed to be named after an African-American Medal of Honor Winner, among others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/04/us/politics/army-bases-confederate-names.html
"the grand old ensign… stood up and the west wind kissed it as the sergeant sloped its lance,”
The one thing I'll give Ken Burns any credit for is showing us just how literate alot of average Joes( and Janes!) were back in the olden days.
( I hate Ken Burns because his highly homogenized brand of history becomes conventional wisdom once he's given it the big budget white guy conventional wisdom PBS treatment. )( I hated "Jazz")
Happy Holiday.! The yokels went to town last night- much money's were spent at Freedom Fireworks ( World's Largest!) (How can every Fireworks store be the World's Largest? )
I begin day 3 of a 9 day remodeling blitz. Here's some advice - if you ever get the urge to build a restaurant style booth in your kitchen and figure you can just cut an old church pew in half to do it - don't .
It's hard AF.
I take it the pew splintered?
It's upholstered. Cutting it was a challenge. Cut the fabric. Cut the
Pad.Pull it back out of the way. Cut the wood frame. Return the pad. Pull the fabric back over it and staple it. It was do - able. . The hardest part was getting up the nerve. The main problem is pews have a closed end- like a chair. Booths are open sided so you can slide in. I couldn't cut the side down - least ways so it didn,'t look like I was angry at it. I ended up removing g the side completely forcing me to reinforce the back and the seat enough so you could sit in it and it won,'t come apart. This involves steel bars, brackets. Complicated hidden braces. Jesus Christ. At this point I just want you get it done and really don't give a fuck what it looks like. A liberating feeling. that. Usually when you get to that point you figure out later it looks fine and you were just too close to the work to ever be happy with it.
I've done projects like this, when you're done, about 5% of the content is the thing that motivated you to start in the first place.
It's the church pew of Theseus.
I didn’t care for Burns’s “Jazz”, either. Too much Wynton Marsalis. Wynton’s outlook on jazz is reactionary, dismissing anything that doesn’t comport with his idea about what jazz should be. All that footage of Wynton scatting made me turn to another station.
Much like "The Civil War" had too much Shelby Foote and too much Eastern Theater
This is some fiery sheet, my dude -- a call to resistance in the years or decades of unavoidble conflict to come.
Happy Fort, you & all the rest of ya's.
Roy, this is fantastic, I’d say you should write speeches but since 97% of politicians are a waste of space, I think your talents are better served elsewhere. But your talent certainly deserves a broader audience than this newsletter affords it.
If the New York Times can publish guest opinions that boil down to “Isn’t SCOTUS overturning Roe just a response to Black people demonstrating about the police killing them, really?” it’s journalistic malpractice no one has given you an opinion column of your own.
I kind of feel celebrating this year is like the meme says: "you take away my rights and now you want me to go to your birthday party?" But perhaps, just maybe, better times are coming, and in any event my grilling skills will soon be required. So Happy 4th, all.
Can't remember whether it was the Post or the Times, but one of them had an op-ed yesterday, something like "Prosecuting Trump Will Tear America Apart." Not too far away, in a somewhat related story, a map shows abortion illegal in 26 states, legal in the remaining 24, an almost-perfect 50-50 divide. Yeah, it would be a real shame if we did something as "divisive" as prosecuting Trump.
That would be the editors of the Washington Post, echoing the stylings of Andrew McCarthy, whom they’d hosted a couple of days ago.
OTOH, it's the mainstream media, so, you know, you're expecting what they won't deliver i.e. an end to the toxic BS.
I don't Twitter, so thanks for the link to ASO. My much older brother retired as a Lt. Col. in the Army Reserves and is a well-read amateur military historian; and when my boys were growing up he took them and me to Harper's Ferry and several Civil War battlefields, describing and explaining all the way. As we approached Gettysburg, he turned to face the boys and said, "Now imagine you're a teenager who's never been away from home before, marching down a dusty road in the hot July sun in a wool uniform carrying an 8 lb. rifle, anxious and scared about "seeing the elephant" for the first time...." ASO is almost as good. ; )
I have a great grand-uncle buried on Cemetery Ridge, and my cousin has our great-grandfather's Civil War diary. Unfortunately, not all soldiers in the Civil War were as eloquent as the ones you quote. I was very excited to see that diary (about the size of a deck of cards, only a third as thick), but the laconic, mundane entries were usually one sentence: "Stood picket today," "Got paid today," etc. The most exciting one read, "President Lincoln reviewed the troops today —" and that was it. Nothing about what he saw or thought or felt. I should get better ancestors.
Having been to those battlefields has made it harder for me to countenance the sight of the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag, because I've stood near Bloody Lane at Antietam, and imagined it filled with mangled, dead and dying men covered in gore. Especially when that flag is adopted by Northerners — our ancestors, those men who fought there, how can we disrespect their memories like this?
Faulkner was right.
I used to like fireworks when I was a kid, all the way through adolescence and young adulthood. Now, in my golden years, I fail to see the point of, to understand the pleasure derived from, or any aesthetic experience provided by amateur fireworks — with the exception of displays by truly talented amateurs, none of which l have been privy to in the last decade or so. Professional fireworks, on the other hand, can be thrilling and beautiful.
But the mini bombs and rockets set off by the nabes in the hood are invisible. No rocket’s red glare. They are mostly loud thumps repeating through the night, with occasional sizzles and whooshes punctuating them. It went on last night into early this morning; I don’t look forward to what it will be like tonight, on the actual holiday. My dog, the sweetest, friendliest dog in the world, hates fireworks and if she knew the people responsible for those awful sounds, she would hate them, too.
But I’m glad today’s Breakdown wasn’t a total paean to amateur pyrotechnics. The passage from Haskell’s diary strikes me as poetic and I’m grateful for having an opportunity to read it. And in writing about the time of the civil war rather than the usual adulation of the founding fathers, we get the perspective Americans who defended the nation against the assault brought by other Americans, led by traitors who thought their racist ideology and way of life justified a fucking war. The outcome of the Civil War advanced the idea that equality of people extended to other than white men. That’s well worth celebrating, and if my neighbors want to celebrate it with miniature ordnance and artillery, My dog and I will survive.
You need to see the right fireworks.
The local stuff, yes, kind of bores -- maybe they cite up close and personal, but from a distance, feh.
That said, we did Macy's fireworks Monday (because we had access to the equivalent of a skybox) and they did not disappoint.
This is terrific, Roy, as usual on such occasions. For the sheer fun of it, here's Charles Ives "Fourth of July". It's got more than a dozen All-American tunes, overlapping marching bands, and fireworks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTCF52GQSnA
For anyone interested, here's what Ives wrote about it:
"It's a boy's '4th—no historical orations—no patriotic grandiloquences by 'grown-ups'—no program in his yard! But he knows what he's celebrating—better than most of the county politicians. And he goes at it in his own way, with a patriotism nearer kin to nature than jingoism. His festivities start in quiet of the midnight before, and grow raucous with the sun. Everybody knows what it's like—if everybody doesn't—Cannon on the Green, Village Band on Main Street, fire crackers, shanks mixed on cornets, strings around big toes, torpedoes, Church bells, lost finger, fifes, clam-chowder, a prize-fight, drum-corps, burnt shins, parades (in and out of step), saloons all closed (more drunks than usual), baseball game (Danbury All-Stars vs Beaver Brook Boys), pistols, mobbed umpire, Red, White, and Blue runaway horse,—and the day ends with the sky-rocket over the Church-steeple, just after the annual explosion sets the Town-Hall on fire.
Ives said it was both abstract music and a program piece, your choice. More Ives:
"I remember distinctly, when I was scoring this, that there was a feeling of freedom as a boy has, on the Fourth of July, who wants to do anything he wants to do, and that’s his one day to do it. And I wrote this, feeling free to remember local things etc., and to put [in] as many feelings and rhythms as I wanted to put together. And I did what I wanted to, quite sure that the thing would never be played, and perhaps could never be played—although the uneven measures that look so complicated in the score are mostly caused by missing a beat, which was often done in parades."
"... lost finger..."
Yeah, if you get to the end of it and you still have all your fingers, it's not a Real Fourth of July.
Maybe we should be pondering what state of the nation will be in the next couple of years.
For eons, the idea was was that all the conservatives want is a strong military — presumably for handouts — and otherwise $$$$ for the special interests and nothing more than that. And it looks like that’s inevitable, coming sooner rather than later, and with efforts to weaken and subvert the power of the vote, I can’t see it changing in my lifetime unless, I’d course, in some miracle, it’s prevented.
But more germane lay, that said there, no matter the state of the nation, fireworks are great, the more the better 🎇🎆🧨🧨🧨🧨🧨
OK, so now they've got a flag that means "Murder all the prisoners." Good to know.
I assume the next step is a special flag that means "Rape all the women prisoners, then murder them"
Happy Birthday, America!
It's a black flag. An outlaw flag. And they don't see it. (Or maybe they do and don't care.)
"that treason's flaunting rag in front"
Same one that showed up January 6th.
Obligatory "What to the slave is the Fourth of July" speech by Frederick Douglass link: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/
Only on the 6th it actually made it inside the Capitol, something Robert E. Lee and the whole Confederate Army couldn't accomplish.
Lost the war, won the peace as I love to say.
Funny how Douglass' speech lost little over the decades. Not.
When I was a kid we lived for awhile in Buffalo, NY where as in all NY you can't do fireworks. My folks would take us camping on the beach in Canada where we could both purchase and shoot off firecrackers. In my memory it always rained and my sister's air mattress always deflated on the rock that was under it. What I never took in before was the irony that we crossed over into Canada on the Peace Bridge to celebrate this great American holiday.
Our youngest spent July 3-4 at a classmate’s family cabin. Asked how it was, he said it was “The most American cabin I’ve ever been in.” Of course, we needed details. “It’s really 70’s with carpet everywhere, even the bathroom, and there are four deer heads on the wall and when it rained, water dripped from the ceiling into a pot while we played blackjack.” He also said the friends family was “nice but racist fucks” and a 26 year female cousin was dating a 16 year old, so kind of a groomer. But he got to go swimming in the lake and ride in a boat and shoot off fireworks. Would he to go back? “Nah, we left early when her uncle said it was upsetting grandma because my girlfriend and I were hugging.”
Most American Fourth ever.
Good people, I'm sure.
Sorry, no. The fireworks people are selfish shitbags, and after many years of trying unsuccessfully to comfort my terrified dogs for a week on either side of the Fourth, I hope they all die soon.
I no longer much believe in "reality" so am not much affected by your martial turn. Some old part of me sympathizes or empathizes or destabilizes or something but I don't really see how any of it much matters. My advice to the kids is to run as fast from this shit as they can. but as yet they only understand it intellectually, not deep down in their souls, so like you they think things could conceivably get better or that by fighting the power they stand some chance of winning. Hopefully they snap out of it and marry a French person or Canadian or the like before it's too late. I feel like Marlon Brando puttering around the garden. I did my crimes and can now commune with the birds and the bees and the green living things. There's really not much they can do to me, nor much reason that they should. But yea, in my opinion, the young should flee, not fight the power.