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Post by timothylane on Jun 19, 2020 15:43:10 GMT -8
It seems to have become a day celebrated by blacks, and I could see giving it some degree of recognition. It already gets that from every state except the Dakotas, which have almost no blacks. Several woke or weak-kneed companies (including Nike, of course) are making it a company holiday.
I refer to Martin Luther King day as Black Identity Politics Day, and this would be even truer of Juneteenth. The weird thing politically is how little difference it makes. Blacks will vote for the Yellow Jester no matter whether this is an official holiday or not. Recognition of it, as we do with days such as Flag Day, is inevitable and not too unreasonable. But we don't need a holiday 2 weeks before Independence Day any more than we needed one 3 weeks after New Year's (which is a week after Christmas, which is roughly a month after Thanksgiving Day, which is a few weeks after Veterans' Day, which is a month after Columbus Day.
We could always officially rename New Year's Day Emancipation Proclamation Day. Or we could fine one in, say, early April in the middle of the long interval between Washington's Birthday (which is officially named after him but never celebrated on that day) and Memorial Day. Perhaps April 9 could become a holiday as Civil War Victory Day. Never mind that Lee only commanded a single army, with Joseph Johnston, Richard Taylor, and Edmund Kirby Smith surrendering later. (Indeed, there was a skirmish near Brownsville, Texas at Palmito Ranch a month after Lee surrendered. The Confederates won.)
For that matter, the Indians in Indian Territory were still in the field on Juneteenth, and it was a week later that the Shenandoah captured its last large group of prizes -- Yankee whalers -- in the Bering Sea. (They found out the war had ended and sailed all the way to England to surrender there. Considering how much damage they did to the whaling industry, Captain Waddell ought to be an animal rights hero. The same thing would be true of the captain of the German raider Pinguin, which did similar damage to the Norwegian whaling fleet in World War II.)
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 19, 2020 19:09:38 GMT -8
We learned this in Texas history. As I recall, the only Confederate Medal issued was issued for participants of that battle.
I got very close to the battle field once on business, but didn't make it all the way.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 19, 2020 19:11:26 GMT -8
I just learned that Juneteenth became an official Texas holiday in 1979. I had left the USA in early 1977, so there is no wonder I had not heard of it.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 22, 2020 14:47:51 GMT -8
On June 22, 1812, Napoleon I invaded Russia. On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler invaded Russia. "When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment." Actually, that wasn't entirely true: an American Communist haranguing a crowd about the iniquities of fighting Stalin's German friend switched in mid-speech to calling for war on behalf of the Motherland. I wonder if George Orwell heard about this (or some similar incident elsewhere).
Considering how both invasions worked out, I wonder if this would be a day to mourn (for all the death and destruction they wrought in Russia) or a day to celebrate (their ultimate victories) in Russia.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 2, 2020 15:57:19 GMT -8
Independence Day is approaching, and I thought this article by Jason Whitlock was appropriate. Onward and upward |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 2, 2020 16:34:22 GMT -8
Interesting article. One minor correction to it is that Jefferson, at some level, probably did believe that blacks were equal to whites. There are many statements by him ruing slavery, such as worrying how a just God might treat America because of it. (Strange attitude for a deist, but Jefferson was a strange man.) He never freed his slaves, other than the Hemings family in his will, but that was partly because (like most people) he couldn't resist the siren call of filthy lucre. Especially when he found out how valuable a commodity slaves could be on the market. And he needed a lot of money, much of it for buying books (a concern I can certainly sympathize with).
I wonder how many people complaining about the racist Founding Fathers are aware that Congress passed (without a single state dissenting, each state having a veto under the Articles of Confederation) the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, banning slavery through the entire area (basically, the Midwest east of the Mississippi). They also banned the slave trade in 1808, which may be before the British did, much less other European nations. (Due to a pernicious provision in the Constitution, they couldn't do so earlier.) I'd bet that the 1619 Project "historians" are unaware of both.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 2, 2020 17:14:39 GMT -8
Jefferson first draft of the Declaration when mentioning the offenses of KG III: he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. That its about as eloquent a condemnation of slavery ever written in the 18th century |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 2, 2020 17:43:39 GMT -8
That was indeed superb, but also rather hypocritical. Jefferson was himself a large slave-holder, as were many other Founders (including some signers of the Declaration), and there were many slave-traders in New England "whose fortunes are made in the triangle trade", as Edward Rutledge puts it in 1776 in my favorite song from the musical, "Molasses to Rum to Slaves".
Of course, as wikipedia points out, this was historically inaccurate. Congress voted to declare independence before it approved the Declaration, so there likely was no threat to vote against unless that was taken out. But it would have looked awfully hypocritical to someone like Samuel Johnson, who wondered "Why do the loudest yelps from liberty come from the drivers of slaves?" Of course, that wasn't exactly right, either, since neither John nor Samuel Adams owned a single slave, and this was no doubt also true of many other Founders from the northern colonies. Maybe even some from the southern colonies.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 2, 2020 19:03:42 GMT -8
Whitlock understands the need to put history into context and how the written word of statesmen may not 100% represent political reality at the time it is written, rather it can be aspirational and with the hope of inspiring future generations in their pursuit of "a more perfect union."
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Post by artraveler on Jul 2, 2020 19:49:26 GMT -8
That was indeed superb, but also rather hypocritical.
For the 18th century it was the most radical thing possible. Jefferson and the congress still had to fight a war and win it, no mean feat, since they all knew that most revolutions fail and the leaders lose their, lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Although, both North and South had their fingers deep in the slave trade. The south was going to hang on as long as possible, and politics is the art of the possible. Something had to give in order to create union. If nothing else, it was the first time congress kicked a difficult issue down the road. I do think that the provision ending the slave trade, in their minds, would end southern slavery shortly thereafter.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 2, 2020 20:03:13 GMT -8
I suspect you're right that, at least at the Constitutional Convention, they expected the eventual elimination of the slave trade to mean the eventual end of slavery further down the road. Too bad they required it to be delayed 20 years.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 2, 2020 20:14:19 GMT -8
Too bad they required it to be delayed 20 years.
They could not predict the cotton gin and the industrial revolution that would, for a time, make slavery economic, especially as the small farms turned into latifundia and the value of slaves tripled. Thus, we return to the war and the issues that created it.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 19, 2020 20:35:29 GMT -8
July 20, 1944 was the date of Operation Valkyrie, perhaps the most serious of the many efforts to remove Hitler. And 25 years later came the landing of Apollo 11 in the Sea of Tranquility, when Neil Armstrong took a small step that represented a giant leap for mankind.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 4, 2020 6:00:58 GMT -8
Today is a significant day in Americana. In the forenoon of August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts
Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.
Me being me, I have to note that Lizzie Andrew Borden was acquitted of the murders, that the weapon was almost certainly a hatchet, that Abby Durfee Borden was her stepmother, and that the total number of whacks is estimated at about 30, not 81. But that's poetic license for you.
Of course, there are lots of poems about notorious (and even not-so-notorious) criminals. Donald Rumbelow included several in The Complete Jack the Ripper, including 2 about Saucy Jack himself (purportedly by the killer) and others involving suspects or related crimes (fictional or real). Mary Ann Cotton (who used arsenic aka inheritance powder to kill a lot of people who got in her way over the decades) and Ed Gein (who inspired Psycho) had poem about them, too. And who can forget "Mack the knife", though MacHeath was a fictional killer (from Berthold Brecht's Threepenny Opera)? I'll leave with this famous admonition:
Shut the door and bolt the latchet! Here comes Lizzie with a brand new hatchet!
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Post by timothylane on Aug 13, 2020 20:51:18 GMT -8
Today is the 75th anniversary of V-J Day, when Japan announced its acceptance of Allied surrender terms despite a serious effort by hard-liners to block it with a coup. The formal surrender took place at the beginning of September, aboard the battleship USS Missouri.
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Post by timothylane on Sept 5, 2020 9:53:20 GMT -8
Today is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, in which Teddy Roosevelt brokered a peace between Russia and Japan. Japan had won every significant engagement in the war, but was running out of resources. As a result, both sides wanted peace, but Japan needed it more. As a result, they didn't get quite as much as they wanted, though there was no doubt they won.
But the Japanese people didn't know about their overextended resources (naturally the government wasn't going to advertise its vulnerability). So their government fell amid nationalist riots. This could be considered a foreshadowing of later Japanese nationalist militancy that ultimately led them to World War II. One problem was their abrasive racial chip-on-the-shoulder attitude toward Europeans. We see the same thing among many blacks today.
Roosevelt's successful peacemaking made him the first American to receive (and in his case deserve) the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 10, 2020 9:30:14 GMT -8
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Post by timothylane on Sept 10, 2020 10:41:24 GMT -8
I remember at the time reading that Lazenby was unhappy with the way the cast and crew treated him while doing On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He had been a male model, as I recall, not an actor, and his experience may have soured him on the role. When Sean Connery decided to come back to the role, of course, that was that. No one was going to displace Connery. Lazenby sort of reprised the role when he had a cameo in the Man From UNCLE TV movie as the Bondesque driver of a car with license plate "JB".
I note Diana Rigg's background as a Shakespearean actress. After doing The Avengers (and it's interesting that she took a brief detour as a Bond girl, just like Honor Blackman, who went from Cathy Gale to Pussy Galore), she went back to Shakespearean acting (I saw her in on TV in A Midsummer Night's Dream and later in King Lear). But she prepared for it with a role as Edwina Lionheart in Theatre of Blood. Oddly, she later succeeded her costar in that movie, Vincent Price, hosting Mystery! on PBS.
The name Emma Peel came because someone in production thought they needed a character with appeal to men -- i.e., "M appeal". She certainly lived up to that desire. She and Patrick MacNee were featured in a lot of superb episodes, such as "The House That Jack Built", "The Cybernauts" and its sequel, at least one of her remakes of a Cathy Gale episode, "The Danger-Makers", "The Fear Merchants", "Dead Man's Race", and the superb "Murdersville". And many others.
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Post by artraveler on Sept 10, 2020 12:48:26 GMT -8
Mrs. Peel has died. I think her last major role was Olenna Tyrell on Game of Thrones.I remember the Avengers. She positivity confirmed for me that I never could be gay. She remained an active actress into her 80s, She will be missed. |
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Post by timothylane on Sept 11, 2020 8:02:45 GMT -8
There's a photo gallery of Diana Rigg at imdb.com that shows 107 photos of her in various situations, including many of her roles. This includes several from The Game of Thrones, The Avengers, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Theater of Blood, The Assassination Bureau, The Great Muppet Caper (I had forgotten about the last two), and a few others (including some Shakespearean roles).
Interestingly, at least two of her Theater of Blood photos also included Ian Hendry, who was also in it. In efect, he was Patrick Macnee's original partner in The Avengers. He left after one season, not wanting to be typecast, to be replaced by Honor Blackman. Rigg came next, and then Linda Thorson. And later came Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt.
The comic strip Working Daze also included a response to Rigg's death. Of course, the geeky types there would be the sort to be staunch Emma Peel fans.
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