Good Morning! Do you have plans for the Memorial Day Weekend? There's still time to make some plans.
This is not the Gardening Thread, but partly due to an unusual occurrence last week and partly due to Spring, we have extra flower photos from The Horde, including Red, White and Blue flowers from Don in Kansas, who has been busy with his camera. Aren't they gorgeous?
Powerline has one of their fleeting links up to this piece, Reflections on Memorial Day, Mackubin Owens
In 1998, I was invited to deliver the Memorial Day address at Newport City Hall. In my address, I sought to recur to the true meaning of the holiday. Memorial Day, I said, had unfortunately come to signify little more than another three-day weekend, which had obscured even the vestiges of its intended meaning: a solemn time, serving both as catharsis for those who fought and survived, and to ensure that those who followed would not forget the sacrifice of those who died that the American Republic and the principles that sustain it, might live.
Americans, I contended, had forgotten how to honor their war heroes and to remember their war dead. As my friend and fellow Marine, "Bing" West observed several years ago in his remarkable book about Fallujah, No True Glory, stories of soldierly courage deserve "to be recorded and read by the next generation. Unsung, the noblest deed will die."
I noted that what we now call Memorial Day was established by General John A. Logan's "General Order No. 11" of the Grand Army of the Republic dated 5 May, 1868. This order reads in part: "The 30th day of May 1868 is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers and otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land." Logan's order served to ratify a practice that was already widespread, both in the North and the South, in the years immediately following the Civil War.
. . . The inconsolable pain and grief of the mother of my fallen Marine with whom I corresponded put me in mind of Rudyard Kipling's poem, Epitaphs of the War, verse IV, "An Only Son": "I have slain none but my mother, She (Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me." Kipling too, lost his only son in World War I.
But as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in his Memorial Day address of 1884,"[G]rief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope and will."
So by all means, have that burger this weekend. Enjoy the barbeque. Go to the beach. But also take some time to watch Taking Chance and remember to honor those who died to make your weekend possible.
The entire piece is worth reading and considering during this weekend, especially if you have young people around.
Memorial Day Weekend Events
Are there still events commemorating Memorial Day in your area? The Central Valley of California is one area where such community events are still observed. Flags, ceremonies, concerts . . .
Random Observations
Ace included a tweet from Nellie Bowles in his Great Withering of Humankind post yesterday (which some people are bookmarking for later consideration).
Nellie Bowles is not exactly a conservative, but she has been moving toward the right. Not totally, for sure.
Good progressives are tossing the heady days of wine and wokeness down the memory hole. Lucky for us, there was a witness.
Remember the heady days of 2020? Progressives trained by the richest universities in the land suddenly had the chance to remake America in their image, the way they had always dreamed of doing. The result was so obvious and crushing a failure that one is no longer supposed to talk about it.
Four years later, the power elite have discovered that their cosplay revolution is seen as merely ridiculous. Minority groups don't want the new names that have been issued to them. Straight people prefer not to be called cisgender, and gay people don't like being submerged in a tide of heterosexuals who style themselves queer. Even The New York Times, that high conclave of official euphemisms, has begun to soft-pedal chilling locutions like "gender-affirming care for minors," instead referring honestly to puberty blockers and body-altering surgery.
Nellie Bowles' Morning After the Revolution is a grand tour through the craziness that followed the killing of George Floyd and continues to this day, despite the majority of Americans shaking their heads in bewilderment. Bowles, a former Times reporter, started out as a progressive seeker, curious and hopeful about the new thinking, and she is still seeking solutions to racism, income inequality, and attacks on women's rights. But she also sees the absurdity of much of what passed for progressivism, yet was actually narcissistic, neo-racialist, and aggressively inhumane.
Nellie Bowles has a sense of the ironic:
But to Western elites, anyone who hates us a lot is. . . kind of hot right now. If he's chanted Death to America, we're into him. If he kills thousands of dissidents as part of a fundamentalist religious revival, that's him really putting ancient indigenous values into practice.
How's that old Patriarchy doing in the USA?
It is dogma among radical feminists and the identity politics brigades that America is in the oppressive grip of The Patriarchy. It would seem this is obsolete information (I know, facts have nothing to do with anything--"facts" are an oppressive white male construct, like "objectivity"). From our irrepressible pal Mark Perry:
Check out the responses at the link.
Music
God Bless America, Kate Smith
Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
You may remember that after last week's thread, Preparing for the Unexpected, was posted, the site went down. Unexpectedly!
When the site came back up, Tom Servo said,
I waited all day to make some incredibly pithy and insightful comment on this thread, but now I forgot what it was. It was really good, though.
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.