Meme Dump

Happy Memorial Decoration Day

I have posted this before but I do think it bears repeating.

This is the story of the first Decoration Day, which would become Memorial Day, that occurred down here in South Carolina, where good, sweet, wonderful things do happen.

Enjoy, and Happy Memorial Decoration Day.

"The First Decoration Day"

by David W. Blight, Yale University

Americans understand that Memorial Day, or "Decoration Day," as my parents called it, has something to do with honoring the nation's war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

As a nation we are at war now, but for most Americans the scale of death and suffering in this seemingly endless wartime belongs to other people far away, or to people in other neighborhoods. Collectively, we are not even allowed to see our war dead today. That was not the case in 1865.

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how remember it.

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war's devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing "John Brown's Body." The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens' choir sang "We'll Rally around the Flag," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: "for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession."

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.

According to a reminiscence written long after the fact, "several slight disturbances" occurred during the ceremonies on this first Decoration Day, as well as "much harsh talk about the event locally afterward." But a measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: "I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this." In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream dominance.

Officially, as a national holiday, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization, called on all former northern soldiers and their communities to conduct ceremonies and decorate graves of their dead comrades. On May 30, 1868, when flowers were plentiful, funereal ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183 cemeteries in twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and towns in thirty-one states, including the South, arranged parades and orations. The observance grew manifold with time. In the South Confederate Memorial Day took shape on three different dates: on April 26 in many deep South states, the anniversary of General Joseph Johnston's final surrender to General William T. Sherman; on May 10 in South and North Carolina, the birthday of Stonewall Jackson; and on June 3 in Virginia, the birthday of Jefferson Davis.

Over time several American towns, north and south, claimed to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. But all of them commemorate cemetery decoration events from 1866. Pride of place as the first large scale ritual of Decoration Day, therefore, goes to African Americans in Charleston. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of flowers and marching feet on their former owners' race course, they created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.

The old race track is still there — an oval roadway in Hampton Park in Charleston, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the white supremacist Redeemer governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on the old track any day of the week. The old gravesite dedicated to the "Martyrs of the Race Course" is gone; those Union dead were reinterred in the 1880s to a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives, the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.

David W. Blight teaches American History at Yale University where he is the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the author of the Bancroft prize-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the forthcoming A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation.

Why Is It ...

… that when my boss told me he was going to make a swear jar just for me I said I don’t have the kind of income to keep up with my mouth.

… that people around people who don’t swear makes me feel like I am in an unsafe environment.

… that what some people call multitasking, I call doing something else until I remember what I was going to do in the first place.

… that I am not actually funny, I’m just really mean and people think I’m joking.

… that people need to know that while I cannot change water into wine, I can turn tequila into bad decisions and total fucking mayhem.

… that I giggle before I go crazy because I gotta rev that engine.

… that I may not be the best looking, or the smartest, but I am am also not the nicest so please stop talking to me.

… that y’all don’t realize that I need a leaf blower … for people.

… that no one realizes that South Carolina has Winter, then Fake Spring, and then Spring, and when you’re in Fake Spring you must remember that Winter is just around the corner with a folding chair.

Meme Dump

This Is The GOP & Why You Need To Vote Blue

There are a lot of reasons to vote Blue in November, and I will share some of those with you, but first, let’s take a look at the reason to Vote Blue.

Project 2025 

Under a GOP president this plan, would:

• Eliminate the Department of Education
• Use public funds to pay for private religious schools
• Encourage Christian indoctrination in public schools … Ten Commandments in every classroom was the start.
• Dismantle Civil Rights and DEI [Diversity, equity, and inclusion] in all levels of government.
• Eliminate no fault divorce.
• Total ban on abortions, regardless of viability or health of the mother.
• Ban all contraceptives.
• Ban African American and Gender Studies in all levels of education.
• Tax cuts for major corporations and the 1% while increasing taxes on everyone else.
• Eliminate unions and all worker protection
• Raise the retirement age.
• Eliminate Social Security for the elderly and the disabled.
• Promote capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of such sentences
• Condemn single mothers and only recognize “traditional” families by overturning Obergefell v Hodges in attempts to eliminate the LGBTQ+ community.
• Dismantle the FBI and Homeland Security.
• Use of military to break up protests
• Eliminate Head Start and Free/Discounted school lunch programs
• Ban books and curriculum regarding slavery.
• Force immigrants to be deported or held in camps and end birth right citizenship
• Ban Muslims from entering the country
• Dismantle the Food and Drug Administration [FDA]. The Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] and more.

This is the plan of the GOP and we know it’s the plan because The Felon says it’s not their plan and he’s a pathological liar. Here’s more:

THE FELON

Top advisers to The Felon have begun to discuss draft language for the 2024 Republican platform that antiabortion leaders expect will abandon the party’s decades-long call to amend the US Constitution to extend personhood protections to the unborn.

The escalating behind-the-scenes disagreement over the abortion language has become so acrimonious in recent weeks that some social conservative leaders have issued public warnings. The Felon’s advisers, in turn, have been angered by the public pressure from antiabortion activists.

Listen, the man is a pathological liar who promised to appoint anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court and then did that; and when they each, after first saying under oath that Roe was settled law, overturned a woman’s right to choose.

Do not believe The Felon; he’s saying these things to get women to vote for him and most women are smarter than that.

The Felon also revived one of his go-to lies about his record on veteran policy during a Fourth of July message to supporters this week.

Veterans Choice, a program that allows veterans experiencing long wait times in the V.A. medical system to seek care at private facilities, was actually signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2014.

NORTH CAROLINA

Mark Robinson, the extremist GOP nominee for governor apparently endorsed political violence in a bizarre and extended rant delivered in a small-town church:

“Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”

Robinson’s call for the “killing” of “some folks” came during an extended diatribe in which he attacked an extraordinary assortment of enemies, like Democrats and liberals, the LGBTQ+ community and migrants.

Kill them, he said.

OKLAHOMA

Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters says educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.

Walters issued a memo last week instructing all Oklahoma schools to teach students in grades five through 12 about the Bible’s influence on the nation’s founding and historical American figures. Schools will also be required to stock a Bible in every classroom.

They’re trying to force Christian Nationalism on America’s children, proving, again, that the GOP is the group grooming children.

GOOD NEWS:

UTAH

Representative John Curtis won the GOP Senate primary last week over a Felon-endorsed candidate to replace outgoing Senator Mitt Romney.

Curtis won the primary easily with nearly 52% of the vote and is considered to be a moderate Republican, as shown by his vote for the Respect for Marriage Act codifying the Obergefell Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. He is a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and the moderate Republican Main Street Caucus.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Sheri Biggs, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and Air National Guard Lt. Col., beat out Felon-endorsed “pastor” Mark Burns in South Carolina’s 3rd District Republican runoff.

Burns is a Death to Gays pastor so this is Good News.

Please note, that we are beating the GOP in a lot of unusual places [Utah and South Carolina] just as we beat them in 2020, 2022, 2023, and here in 2024.

Stand tall, speak up, and …

Vote Blue. Here's Another Slew of Reasons Why

Here we are again, with a wee taste of the lunacy, racism, criminality, and bigotry and hate inside the GOP … and let’s start with the Dog Killer:

SOUTH DAKOTA

Y’all know that dog killing liar Kristi Noem, has a book coming out but now her office is saying she will go back and correct some errors … like when she claimed to have met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un:

“I remember when I met with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants—I’d been a children’s pastor after all.”

Except that never happened though Noem’s spokesperson claims it was an “error” to include Kim in a list of world leaders who Noem has met. And other “corrections” in future editions will include removing a false claim about a conversation with Nikki Haley that never happened, and the time Noem says she declined French President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation to sit in his box during an Armistice Day Parade because he supposedly made “pro-Hamas comments.” His office says that “never” happened.

Noem stands by her lies as being “small errors.”

It’s not a stretch from Republican to liar, or even dog killer to liar.

On the upside, a county Republican group in Colorado has cancelled a fundraiser featuring Kristi Noem after she wrote gleefully about murdering her dog.

Jefferson County Republican Party Chair Nancy Pallozzi said that the group’s fundraising dinner was being cancelled “due to safety concerns” after the group, the governor and her staff, and the hotel hosting the event received “numerous threats and/or death threats.”

People don’t like dog killers.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto pushed back on a claim by Nancy Mace, the GOP Representative from South Carolina, who says that progressive billionaire George Soros funded the groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Mace claimed:

“You’ve got groups that are funded by George Soros. There are Palestinian rights groups that I believe are involved, funded by George Soros, and they need to be off of our college campuses if they’re committing violence, full stop.”

 Cavuto, no stranger to dealing with lying Republicans like Nancy Mace, said:

“There’s no proof that these are funded by George Soros, by the way… their folks have denied that.”

“We’ll agree to disagree, I guess.”

“I’ve just looked for the checks and I haven’t seen them yet.”

Nancy Mace is a Kristi Noem wannabe.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

The New Hampshire House passed a bill to raise the legal age of marriage to 18; Senate Bill 359 states that “no person below the age of 18 years shall be capable of contracting a valid marriage, and all marriages contracted by such persons shall be null and void.” Under present law, that age is 16.

But GOP Representative Jess Edwards argued that taking away the possibility of marriage could lead more 16- and 17-year-olds to abortion:

“If we continually restrict the freedom of marriage as a legitimate social option, when we do this to people who are a ripe, fertile age and may have a pregnancy and a baby involved, are we not in fact making abortion a much more desirable alternative, when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couples?”

Yes, he’s worried about sixteen-year-olds having abortions as opposed to forcing them to marry at that age.

ALABAMA

The House voted to make school and public library staff criminally liable for distributing “sexual or gender-oriented material” to minors without parental consent, placing libraries in the same category as “adult-only” stores, movies and entertainment. GOP Representative Arnold Mooney sponsored the legislation.

Seriously. And it would force school and public librarians to remove a book that someone finds obscene or harmful to minors within seven days of written notice to the library director or principal. If they don’t they could face a misdemeanor.

It’s unclear who will determine if the book is obscene.

SOUTH CAROLINA

During an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, GOP Senator Tim Scott—his head still up Hair Furor’s ass looking for that VP nod—repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election.

Yes, the election that hasn’t happened yet, he says will be rigged if Hair Furor doesn’t win. Welker tried, and tried, and tried again to get Scott to say he will accept the results of the 2024 election:

“Will you commit to accepting the election results of 2024: Bottom line?”

“At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump.”

“Yes or no? Will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter who wins?”

“That is my statement.”

No, the statement is Tim Scott is a pandering, goose-stepping asshat who is doing Hair Furor’s bidding because he wants a high-profile spot in the Traitor’s administration.

TENNESSEE

GOP Governor Bill Lee plans to sign a bill state legislators sent to his desk that would allow school staff members to carry concealed handguns on school grounds:

“What’s important to me is that we give districts tools and the option to use a tool that will keep their children safe in their schools.”

No money for books or computers or more teachers to reduce class size, but a bill to allow teachers to carry weapons.

PENNSYLVANIA

GOP Representative Mike Kelly, an outspoken critic of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, used the law to receive a grant to install solar panels at one of his car dealerships. 

Kelly has long derided the Inflation Reduction Act, which made his grant possible, saying:

“The bill provides $375 billion in so-called ‘climate change’ legislation, which include $7,500 tax credits for wealthy Americans to purchase electric vehicles (EV).”

He voted that you can’t benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act, but he can.

GOP hypocrisy, and the fact that they think their constituents are stupid enough to fall for his lies.

TEXAS

GOP Representative Troy Nehls has repeatedly claimed to be the recipient of two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman Badge from his time serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a review of his service record by the Pentagon show Nehls received one—not two—Bronze Star medals. And his Combat Infantryman Badge from Afghanistan was revoked from his service record in 2023 because Nehls served as a civil affairs officer, not as an infantryman or Special Forces soldier.

Emily Matthews, Nehls’ press secretary, declined to discuss the matter or provide any explanation for the discrepancies.

More lies from Republicans.

GOODNEWS

GOP CONVENTION

NBC News interviewed more than 15 major corporate fundraisers and consultants with corporate clients, and many have expressed concern over a charged political climate that they worry could backfire on their brand or where an investment would not pay off.

They say that Hair Furor and the baggage that comes with backing him, and that slew of GOP liars, hypocrites and thieves I just mentioned, was most often cited as a consideration by many of the corporate donors and consultants to avoid any connection with the GOP and RNC.

Uh oh; if the RNC doesn’t get corporate sponsorship coins, how with they ever pay Hair Furor’s legal bills?

UTAH

Less than 72 hours after the launch of a reporting form to help Utah enforce its transgender bathroom ban, the Utah auditor’s office says it has received nearly 4,000 complaints. And all of them appear to be “bogus.”

Utah Auditor John Dougall says his office created the online reporting tool to comply with GOP Representative Kera Birkeland’s “Sex-based Designations for Privacy, Anti-bullying and Women’s Opportunities.

Birkeland is a former Mrs. Utah beauty pageant contestant and her sole previous legislative record is a successful resolution that criticizes Shaquille O’Neal’s free throw record and mocks his movie’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Really.

Oh, and last year she introduced an anti-abortion bill that was condemned by her own sister, who is a rape survivor.

CNN

News anchor Kaitlan Collins caught GOP Senator J.D. Vance flat-footed during a line of questioning on the current pro-Palestine protests on college campuses across the country.

Collins quizzed the pro-Hair Furor senator on his views regarding the value of free speech versus the safety and well-being of students whose lives have been disrupted by the protests on campus—to which Vance replied that police should only become involved if protesters are breaking the law:

“My view on this is that Israel’s our ally, that we should support them, but you can’t police people for being anti-Israel or pro-Israel. You can police people for violating the law, and we have seen some of that with some of these protests.”

“OK. So you agree that people who break in and vandalize the building should be prosecuted?”

“Exactly.”

Collins then brought up Vance’s past support for the pro-Hair Furor insurrectionists who broke into the US Capitol on January 6.

And Vance gave :::crickets:::

KANSAS

State Republican legislators in Kansas failed to override Democrat Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a proposed ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors; the vote was two votes shy of the necessary two-thirds majority.

The vote in the House was expected to be close after LGBTQ+ rights advocates raised questions about whether the provision against promoting social transitioning is written broadly enough to apply to public school teachers who show empathy for transgender students.

And that’s just a small taste of GOP lunacy ... dog killing liars, fearmongering liars, those in favor of child marriage so teens cannot get an abortion, book banning librarian jailers, those who are already saying the 2024 election is rigged, arming teachers, GOP hypocrisy, more liars about their military service … but there is some spots of Good News.

pardoning traitors for political points; gibberish speakers; anti-military criminals; lunatics and Big Liars; Christian Nationalist Nazi sympathizers; party over country fools; unfit for political office; liars and flip-floppers; and Arizona.

So what do we do if we want more Good News? We ...