Memorial Day began as a Black holiday.  According to Wikipedia,

‘In Charleston, South Carolina in 1865 Freedmen (freed slaves) celebrated at the Washington Race Course (today the location of Hampton Park). The site had been used as a temporary Confederate prison camp for captured Union soldiers in 1865, as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who died there. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, Freedmen exhumed the bodies from the mass grave and reinterred them properly with individual graves. They built a fence around the graveyard with an entry arch and declared it a Union graveyard. On May 1, 1865, a crowd of up to ten thousand, mainly black residents, including 2800 children, proceeded to the location for events that included sermons, singing, and a picnic on the grounds, thereby creating the first Decoration Day….’

White people in the North soon took it over to memorialize the Union, anti-slavery war dead.
According to http://www.history.com,

‘During the first [sic] 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.’

During the period which immediately followed the Civil War, White Southerners began similar traditions, but on different dates, such as Jefferson Davis’s birthday.

As time went on, important people began to feel that Northern-Southern rivalry needed to be reduced in order to get on with the nation’s business, most specifically expansionism and imperialism.  This mean a rapprochement between White Northerners and White Southerners, since Blacks, wherever they were, had little to offer.  Efforts were made to emphasize nationalism and reduce regionalism.  The climax of these efforts was a ceremonial reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg in which old Southern soldiers once again charged old Northern soldiers, but this time to embrace one another in friendship rather than kill one another.  Needless to say, no Negroes were present or wanted.  As Wikipedia notes,

‘The ceremonies and Memorial Day address at Gettysburg National Park were nationally famous, starting in 1868. However not until 1913, was a Southerner asked to give the main address. In July 1913, veterans of the United States and Confederate armies gathered in Gettysburg to commemorate the fifty-year anniversary of the Civil War’s bloodiest and most famous battle. The four-day “Blue-Gray Reunion” featured parades, reenactments, and speeches from a host of dignitaries, including President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner in the White House since the War. Congressman James Heflin of Alabama was given the honor of the main address….’

And so on Memorial Day, 1913, White North and White South stood together firmly on the backs of the Black people who had invented the holiday.  Memorial Day had been turned from an occasion to mourn and honor men who fought for the freedom of others to an occasion to celebrate war and racism.

Later, the same transformation was worked on Armistice Day; it became Veterans’ Day.  But it is too cold in November to go to the beach.  Too bad!

What is it people are called that get killed following jingoism?

Sure I’ll take some time minute to cry about all the poor bastards that have died in every stupid war that ever was. Hell, I’ll count coffins tonight instead of sheep.

****************

Memorial day is definitely my idea of a holiday charade of honor
that is slanderous hypocrisy from the traitors sacrificing
desperate or complicit people to do criminal work for those who
really benefit from those desperate people or wiling thugs
supporting unstable economics.

Crow,

That was a disturbing video.

“The isolation of our military is part of a larger Balkanization of our nation into political and social classes that have little empathy for each other.”

———————————————————

“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”

“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

“The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.”

- Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 1997

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/the-ones-who-attacked-us/

“Operation Desert Storm was a great and important success”

Sold to the US public with lies like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v94WsjWKQ3U

Remember that one, Mr. Dionne?

The last paragraph, particularly, reveals the patriotic delusions:
  “It’s hard to imagine we’ll be that united anytime soon. But history tells us that the honor we accord our veterans is closely linked to the respect and solidarity we express toward each other as fellow citizens of a democracy. Perhaps our veterans can teach us how to do this again.”
  Actually, the “honor” we accord our veterans is largely missing in action because human intelligence is beginning to recognize that war is useless, destructive and counterproductive.  It is never a success; nobody wins; it’s all downhill.  Who wants to be loyal to insanity?
  What our veterans seems to be teaching all who are willing to learn (through their useless suffering and death) is:  “War is hell!  I never expected this!  If I had any choice, this is the last place I would be!  Can I live through it?  When will it be over?  Please, somebody, give me a clue here.  What are we doing in this godforsaken territory?  Help!”
  Alternatives to violence, anybody?

“There’s a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar [flak jacket]. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, ‘They hit us at home and, now, it’s our turn.’ I don’t want to say payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.”

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/payback/

Piffle.

If Memorial Day was intended to actually memorialize the war dead, it wouldn’t be held on a Monday, to create a long weekend in nice weather. It would be on a specific day midweek, and the day would be devoted to remembering.

As it is, it is pious lip-service, little more. The fact that so many people turn it into a beach and barbecue weekend shows that they simply don’t buy into the rhetoric and propaganda.

If anyone gets a chance….listen to

J A M E S   MC M U R T R Y   sing this song he wrote

IT’S MEMORIAL DAY IN AMERICA..

really ,, the whole album is a wonderful description
of rural america, an inspiration.

I’m ‘on’ my seventh American War (II and counting.)  War has become an American Big Business, possibly its biggest which, unfortunately, makes the people fighting (them) merely employees of one of America’s largest corporations, War. 

Given the glaring discrepancy between the pay of a lowly soldier and a mercenary (contractor) the lowly soldier almost qualifies as a sacrificial lamb.

A Baghdad sergeant makes $71/day; a Blackwater security guard makes $1,222/day. (Petraeus, when there, made a mere $493/day.)

“beach-going, barbecues and baseball”

Dionne forgot beer. Maybe he replaced it with “beach-
going” to preserve the alliteration?

After all, not everyone has beach access, but everyone
can quickly secure a cold, refreshing, and (best of
all!) legal route to escapism.

Beer really completes the Memorial Day trinity.
Barbecue (it’s plural without the ‘s’, E.J.) is a
decent symbol for greedy, unthinking slaughter.
Baseball isn’t as good as football to bring to mind
the ‘bread and circuses’ of ritualized warfare as
entertainment and vicarious violence, but it will have
to do (alas, wrong season).

However, beer is really the lynchpin. The social
lubricator, the loosening of restraints, the easy
brotherhood—and most of all, the forgetting. The
sweet oblivion (or at least casual acceptance of
implausible revisionism) at the heart of Memorial Day.

For this is the holiday in which we dwell briefly if
at all upon the vague ‘fallen’ or the more specific
personal examples. But not how they fell (that would,
in many cases, get in the way of enjoying the
barbecue), and certainly not why they fell.

Because if we started thinking about “why”, we’d have
to wonder whether ‘honoring’ was as simple an activity
as we’d believed it to be. Sure, “Regret Day” doesn’t
have the right feel to it, but maybe Memorial Day
could offer us a chance to understand that they really
didn’t have to fall…and maybe even to imagine a
future in which nobody falls, and consider real ways
in which we could make that happen.

I’ve eaten the barbecue and thought about the
beautiful creature that died for it. I can’t really
take a full baseball game, but I’ll watch an episode
of Spartacus instead—it’s shorter, there’s less
advertising, and the causes and consequences of
violence are more graphic.

As far as beer goes, I guess I could have one—I’m a
free adult, and my preferred brand has a patriot on
the label, after all. However, if anything, I think
I’d like to sharpen my memory skills on Memorial Day.
So maybe a lingering draught of the relevant chapters
of Howard Zinn?

You know, re-read the parts about the Civil War, World
War II, and all of those other wonderful social
revolutions that led to the free, fair, and prosperous
future in which we now dwell.

This bears repeating: Once clerico-noble class of life utterly destroyed the civil and civilized groups or tribes of people, very rich in caring-sharing-safety-security,an extremely wicked societal strucure was imposed on us.

Now people do not respect dead and living mercenairies or hired guns for a minority of people.
It does seem then that eating, drinking and watching games is a sensible thing to do.
So, not all USans are stupid! I say good for them! tnx

Stop!

Dionne should read ‘Reflections On The Justice of Roosting Chickens’ by Ward Churchill.  After reading this book, go buy a s…load of hot dogs and grill them to the tune of Happy Memorial Day.

Give me a Break.

“Operation Desert Storm was a great and important success
  Screw You ten times Mr. Journalist.

I can only add my second. Why does truthdig print this person’s writing? It’s always sentimental garbage.

Don’t these guys make you wonder what they teach in
college?

Memorial Day and our discontents….

Most of mine are with Journalists like you, polititcians,
and the corporate swine that you journalists cover for.

“Operation Desert Storm was a great and important success
  Screw You ten times Mr. Journalist.