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May 22, 2009

We Never Learn

From the "learn something new everyday files," it seems that the US President sends a wreath to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetary every Memorial Day.  This year, a group of historians has sent a letter to President Obama, asking him to discontinue this practice.

Fat chance.  Let's face it, whatever else Obama may or may not accomplish, he will never miss a chance to perform a set piece of bipartisan pageantry, especially one of this magnitude.  He's not going to end warrantless wiretapping or bring the prisoners in Guantanamo before real courts.  He might let DADT sit around to his next term and then see if he wants to repeal it.  He may be able to get healthcare reform through or not.  But President Obama is going to prove every goddamn day that he is more bipartisan than anyone this country has ever seen.

A little over 140 years ago the residents of the American south rose up and began brutally slaughtering thousands of their fellow citizens to defend a despicable system of slavery.  They chose to kill and destroy instead of recognizing that the tide of history had finally turned against them.  Yet the memory of these traitors and murderers is honored, the reasons for their crimes santized.  Deserters from the US military - men who took and then broke an oath of service to the Constitution of the United State - are given memorials and characterized as men of honor.  No wonder so much of our country has no understanding of right from wrong.  No wonder there is so little concern with prosecuting the crimes committed by the Bush Administration - we still can't stomach an honest accounting of the Civil War!  We'd rather let millions of Americans believe comforting lies that continue to damage this nation than force them to simply grow up and face facts.

Let's just declare Bush and Cheney's birthdays federal holidays now and be done with it.  Maybe we can build a giant statue of one or the other of them and require everyone to bow before it or risk being thrown into a fiery furnace. 

Comments

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Let's just declare Bush and Cheney's birthdays federal holidays now and be done with it. Maybe we can build a giant statue of one or the other of them and require everyone to bow before it or risk being thrown into a fiery furnace.

I know just exactly what statue their statues should be fashioned after.

I agree with everything you say about the Confederacy and about gestures honoring it. And there are certainly a number of battles already that I wish Obama had fought that he's skipped.

OTOH, I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt for now. He's got more on his plate right now than any President in my lifetime has had at one time, and it really does sometimes happen that the Senator you piss off over something trivial decides to oppose you as a result over something he might've gone either way over. Not to mention, there are only so many battles he can fight at once.

I want meaningful climate change legislation, and we might just get that. I want universal health care, and we might just get that too. (Be nice if Obama seemed willing to fight for inclusion of the public plan, though.) If we can get both of those, as far as I'm concerned, Obama can bury every Confederate memorial in the U.S. under dump-trucks full of the most gaudy assortment of wreaths known to humankind. Plus he's got an economic crisis to deal with, and a Supreme Court Justice to select. And a couple of wars to find a way out of.

So yeah, he's ducking stuff like DADT. I don't like it, but I can't blame him.

According to History.com, the forerunner of Memorial Day was Decoration Day.

http://www.history.com/content/memorial/the-history-of-memorial-day

"During the first celebration of Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, after which 5,000 participants helped to decorate the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery."

When I was a child people ,all over the south went to tidy and decorate their family's graves. Some of those small town and family cemetaries did indeed have graves of CSA veterans. Nobody here wants to argue for either slavery or secession, but allow us please, to honor our dead ancestors, even if they died in an unjust war.

What you said, l-t c.

How's the kid doing?

Oddjob, I think the Bush/Cheney statues might better be modeled on that of Moloch, making the fiery furnace integral to them, into which we could cast our children--as we did.

Given his AfPak commitments (not to mention the Iranian and NATO expansion nonsense), Obama will get a similar statue before he's done.

Meh, every other country has a million memorials and holidays and national defining stories that mostly involve conquering, rape, and pillage. The problem is american exceptionalism, not dixie identity.

yoyo,

Name one country in the history of the world - besides us, of course - whose national government honors traitors to itself.

All war is evil. At rare times it is a necessary evil, but still. My point isn't that no country honors its soldiers, even those that committed atrocities. It's that here in the USA we expend a significant amount of effort making sure that traitors to our own nation are exalted as good and honorable men.

Seriously, find me one other nation in the history of this planet which has done this.

Stephen,

So, by your reckoning, if a CSA soldier survived the war and became again a citizen if the USA, he should be dishonored in death as a traitor? Or the 15-year-old barefoot kid whose family owned no slaves and knew too little about war except what was done to his people?

You could make a more rational case for changing the inscription on the DAR monument than you can for abandoning any soldier buried at Arlington or anywhere else in this country.

Some people who opposed some wars of the last century argued that the soldiers were unworthy of honor. People treated returning Vietnamese veterans with dishonor.

Do you believe you are the arbiter of just and unjust when it comes to honoring war veterans?

corvus - Ilya's doing great! He's learning new words daily, he's figured out how to push stuff over next to the baby gates and use it to climb over, which makes his dad proud, and drives his mom nuts. Our local farmers' market opened a week ago, and I took him down, and he had his first FRESH strawberries there, which he couldn't get enough of. That kid had a serious case of strawberry mouth. Summertime's gonna be a great time to be a parent!

3 oz. Premature Conclusion Juice
2 shots Hysteria
1/2 shot Rage

Shake violently and pour over crushed hopes into a wide mouthed glass rimmed with snark.

Little cocktail we call Suhpecial.

Toast,

Act out your emotional problems somewhere else.

To respond to someone with an actual point,

So, by your reckoning, if a CSA soldier survived the war and became again a citizen if the USA, he should be dishonored in death as a traitor?

Should the children of a murderer be able to demand that their ancestor is honored by the federal government? Treason is a crime.

I could support the idea of acknowledging the dilemma faced by residents of the American south that found themselves suddenly called to fight as citizens of a new nation. I could support including them in places like Arlington and in the ceremonies that surround Memorial Day, if the real goal wasn't to whitewash the actions of traitors like Robert E. Lee and every other deserter from the US military, as well as all the southern politicians who betrayed their oaths of office by making war on their own nation.

If being honest about deserters and traitors like Lee and Thomas Jackson isn't pleasant for their descendents, that's just too bad. Honesty and reality should be valued more than certain families' desires to deny what their forebears did. But these men - and the rest of the decision-makers who actually caused the Civil War and therefore every death, every injury that came out of it - are memorialized and honored throughout the south, in local, state and even federal sites.

Again, I welcome evidence that any other nation - not its people, but an actual government - honoring traitors. Talk about a peculiar institution.

Don't be silly. Every government ever started out as a traitorous plot or coup or foreign conqueror. Just with time, people start to think these people were right. The only thing notable about the confederacy was that it failed.

The british celebrate Guy Fawks' day, which is about anti-governmental terrorism in support of a foreign religion (and italian temporal power.) And lots of feteting still goes on for the magna carta, which was forced on the king and i'm sure thought of by the plantagenet monarchs as treasonous limitation on their divine powers. I'm sure there are more examples from just about any country, if i knew history from more. the main exceptions are new world places where there been less internal struggle worth remembering.

In any nation, the important powers all want to be recognized. In a democracy, that means that the voters of the south are going to be recognized, and markers of their culture and history will be given respect, even if the relevant way they differ from other regions are mostly shit.

Yoyo,

Try not to be insulting. Toast has decided to pretty much only write puerile insults in response to my posts, and I wouldn't want him to feel like anyone is encroaching on his turf.

First, "Every government ever started out as a traitorous plot or coup or foreign conqueror" is irrelevant. My point is that no other government has evern been in the business of honoring those who betrayed it.

Second, Guy Fawkes' Day is celebrated as a victory over traitors. Perhaps you're thinking of V for Vendetta, which turned Guy Fawkes into a hero of sorts.

Third, the Magna Carta was accepted as law by the king. Maybe he didn't like it, but so what? It became law, and therefore an event it makes sense to celebrate.

There is something to consider in the fact that the colonies became a country called United States by becoming traitors and fighting the Revolutionary War. We won, of course, which doesn't actually change the fact that first there was treason. The winners write the history. Britain has been honoring former colonists for many years.

More to the point of your article, yet another racist hate group has taken the UDC monument as a rallying point and I am, as are all other right-thinking Americans, opposed to them. Send the monument back to the UDC.

This doesn't change the fact that from the very beginning there have been Union and Confederate soldiers buried at Arlington and I doubt the President is going to pick out some of them to honor and dishonor others.

Also, I suggest that neither you nor I know enough about Robert E. Lee to call him names.

I don't have emotional problems, Stephen. I just like pointing out what a hysterical asshat you are. If you don't like it, ban me, you cranky ignorant bitch.

As a retired USAF NCO born and raised in New Hampshire and great-great grandson of a soldier captured in Virginia and imprisoned at Andersonville, I found myself in a dilemma this morning. I now live in Georgia one of the thirteen original states, one of the Confederate states for the duration of that lost cause, and now one of the fifty United States of America. Yesterday, my wife and I went to a little cemetery in our town just to pay a bit of respect to those who've served their country. Noticing that nobody had even bothered to put any flags out at all, when we got home, we looked for some flags and found four, so this morning, I went back to that little cemetery. The first two stones I found that mentioned military service were for people who'd been in WWI. Then came the dilemma - the next two I found were for men who'd served in the War Between the States as members of the Confederacy.

Whoa - we never saw that in our cemeteries in NH. These men had served their country just as I had. They went on to live out their lives in the United States, just as I expect to.

I'm sure some will find fault for my action - but the two CSA gravestones are now marked with USA flags. I figured that if they chose to serve, I could choose to honor.

Toast, WTF? Your cocktail recipe was, let's face it, an insulting and juvenile ad hominem. Disagreeing with someone's passionate opinions re: the definition of treason is one thing; doing so in such a personal, nasty way is unnecessary. As well as atypical.

As for yoyo's completely incorrect reading of British History, well, it needs to be said once again, obviously, that the British do not take treason very lightly. We celebrate the foiling of Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder plot--an ill-intentioned and, thankfully, ill-fated attempt to restore Catholic rule in British government by blowing up Parliament, for Heaven's sake; we do not celebrate the traitor himself. We burn Fawkes in effigy every November 5th (the anniversary of the plot's foiling) in part to remind ourselves that a very evil group attempted to overthrow our government using violence and mayhem that would have harmed many innocents. (Some people think we burned Fawkes at the stake; actually, he hung himself while waiting to be executed in a very nasty way, enough said.)

As for the whole persistent and romantic history-rewriting and hero-worship pertaining to General Lee and the Confederacy, well, Stephen, I'm as baffled as you are. I live in the South and since we moved to the States, no-one has ever satisfactorily explained to me how (or why) so many people can still revere what were, quite simply, the acts of traitors--and even celebrate them and display their flag on cars, houses, and the odd public building! And if you dare to question or criticize this odd behavior, YOU are the bad guy, the non-patriot, the Euro-weenie! To my mind, you cannot support the Constitution and, at the same time, salute the flag of traitors--logic dictates that it's gotta be one or the other.

And yes, where else in the world are the treasonous given such long-enduring honors by the standing government against whom the treason was committed? I suppose you'll think I'm just another stupid foreigner, but I'll admit it anyway: I don't get it, either.

It does seem odd to me that the United States government would honor those who attempted to violently overthrow the United States government. Which, when you cut out all the bullshit romanticization of the CSA and the "cause" it pretty much what this comes down to.

I am not sure that Obama really needs to make a fuss about this particular tradition at this momnet, but it is one that perhaps in the passage of time his administration could simply let fade away.

If you don't like it, ban me

No, Toast, I'm going to let your comments stand, because they're all anyone needs to understand who between us is actually "hysterical." A little foresight and self-discipline would help you from such blatant and public projection.

Going forward, however, I will reserve the right to delete your comments if you insist upon only posting irrelevant insults. I've learned that our commenters with something to say tend to get irritated at childish antics like yours.

And calling me a "bitch?" Got some problems with the womenfolk, Toast? Maybe some masculinity issues? I await your future witty comments that refer to me as a "pussy" and perhaps even "limp-wristed."

Seriously, grow up.

Update: You know what? I went too far with that. I'm not going to delete my own comment, because that's just too weaselly. But it wasn't appropriate for me to respond that way even if I did feel at that time that it was in kind. And anyway, Deborah is right; this whole thing has been atypical.

I'm sure some will find fault for my action - but the two CSA gravestones are now marked with USA flags. I figured that if they chose to serve, I could choose to honor.

The irony is that those soldiers, if they were capable of communicating now, would refuse the honor of having the flag of The United States of America placed at their graves. And indeed, I suspect that more than a few of your fellow Georgians would consider your actions to be dishonorable. They want their Civil War dead honored, even by the federal government in DC, not as "Americans," but as Confederates.

Stephen, I hope your sense that you went too far applies as well to your earlier "Act out your emotional problems somewhere else" response to Toast. Regardless of what you think of Toast's initial comment, that was uncalled for.

As to Lee, I grew up north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and have lived most of my life (with the exception of six months, and even that was only in Delaware) north of it. I've also read more than once that Lee spent more than the usual amount of time soul searching over where his obligation lay.

Post Civil War it is extremely, extremely easy to forget that prior to the Civil War the typical way of referring to the United States of America was in the plural ("these United States are"). The implication of that was that the states were the actual seat of power and it was the states, not the federal government, that ultimately was sovereign.

Prior to the Civil War it was not apparent whether this was in fact the truth or not, and people of good faith had differing opinions about that. From what I've read, I gather that Lee, already a noted army officer held in high regard by the army, was not himself clear as to what the appropriate reading of that matter was. Finally he came to the conclusion that it was the states that were truly sovereign, and that therefore he was a citizen of Virginia before he was a citizen of the USA. If that was so and Virginia was choosing to secede, and again, it was not clear in advance that secession was no longer an option, he made a good faith decision that followed his own reading of the Constitution.

I don't necessarily regard that as treason. He made the same sort of decision the founding fathers had made when it was their turn to wrestle with the matter. It so happened that the South lost (& almost certainly would have, given the economic dominance of the North, and the resources at hand that the Union possessed), but as a philosophical matter I don't automatically brand Lee a "traitor" because I don't automatically brand Washington a "traitor".

It is easy to forget that the winners write the history.

(And I think I've written enough in previous comments for it to be clear I find slavery reprehensible. My points here are separate from any evaluation of the South's culture. They exist regardless of whether the South's culture was reprehensible or not.)

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