On remembering the origins of Memorial Day

I didn't have time to sit down and write this weekend, but I felt compelled to write something short about Memorial Day, especially given the ubiquity of statements about supporting our troops who "fight for our freedom" and the sheer abundance of disremembering I hear and see all around, both in conversation walking around in physical spaces and in posts/comments/images in the virtual spaces of social media, on a day that is about nothing if not memory itself.

Because I know I'm so predictable by this point, I know those of you who have read my previous posts here at Liberal D.O.G.MA know what's coming: something about race, right? 

Right.

But I promised a short piece.

Ok, so first point: Memorial Day began as something called Decoration Day, which itself was begun following the American Civil War. More to the point, the first Decoration Day was May 1, 1865. To quote from a New York Times op-ed by historian David Blight (go read his book Race and Reunion now): 

"The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied 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.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. 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.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible."

Now, second point: why does it matter that we remember these African American origins of Memorial Day and their relation to the Civil War? 

Again, I promised a short piece. So here we go. 

On one level, it is simply (?) important in itself that we acknowledge the prominent role African Americans played in beginning one of our most definitively American traditions, thus reminding us again that African American identity is central, not merely marginal, to American identity.

On another level, it is important to correct mistakes in the historical record of collective memory. Simply put, most folks don't know at all that the first celebrations of what would later be called Memorial Day were enacted by African Americans following the Civil War. And this has ideological consequences in how we think about Memorial Day.

The first celebrators of Memorial Day were indeed celebrating the memory of soldiers who "fought for our freedom," but there was nothing abstract or politically neutral about this statement, and it was very clear who was included in that "our." Indeed, very literally these early Decoration Day celebrators were acknowledging that soldiers died in a war which ultimately resulted in the eradication of institutionalized chattel slavery. It is impossible to re-remember this origin story of Memorial Day without also re-remembering the story about the reasons for the American Civil War and acknowledging that not all motivations for going to war are created equal. 

When we re-remember this origin story, then, we have to rethink this day about memory. For whose freedom do American soldiers fight? Are all wars "just wars"? Do all wars deserve the same kind of respect? Is it possible to honor the warriors while vehemently condemning the violence and imperialism of the war? (I think so) What kinds of more complex and nuanced understandings of war are necessarily called forth when we remember that Memorial Day began as a celebration of one American cause for fighting -- abolition -- over another -- the continuation of slavery?  

How must we think better about how we think about war, given that the very origins of Memorial Day equally point to both the American motivation to fight for freedom and the American motivation to fight for economic motive at the expense of a blatant disrespect for basic humanity?     

Infernal Revenue?

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last week or so, the floodgates have opened (and the "-gate" suffix re-re-re-revived) over reports that the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, have been giving "special consideration" to right-wing and Tea Party-affiliated organizations applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status as "social welfare" non-profits.  From both sides of the aisle, accusations of unfair treatment by the Obama administration on those organizations that seem hell-bent on destroying progressivism under the auspices of Old Glory and Jesus Christ have come out of the ground like an emerging volcano; congressional hearings, on top of the hearings already being done to beat the Benghazi embassy attack into something closely resembling a dead horse, are being launched by the Tea Party sweethearts: Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), just to name a few; and calls of impeachment from right-wing pundits who are clearly orgasming over the opportunity to bash the President and his administration over yet another "grievous violation of the rights of all Americans."  Between Benghazi, the drones, and now this, President Obama and the White House are clearly longing for the sunnier days of 2009 (again).

But hold on just one second - why are we even considering this IRS situation a scandal?  If you look closely, it is not, nor was it ever, nor will it ever be, a scandal - especially a scandal that can be considered "Nixonian," as one particularly hawkish Fox and Friends pundit put it the other day.  The Internal Revenue Service, which is charged with the proper enforcement of the United States tax code and the collections of said tax levies from the American people (because how else is the government going to function?), has the authority to audit and inspect any individual or entity that it deems likely of trying to cheat the tax system (outside of the loopholes placed by Republicans to allow themselves and their wealthy benefactors to have massive piles of cash in the Cayman Islands).  It's job is to ensure that everyone who must pay taxes does so.  Furthermore, the IRS must make determinations of who is eligible for exemption from taxes and what requirements are needed to maintain that tax-exempt status - for example, a 501(c)(3) organization is tax-exempt because it provides services to fulfill an educational, religious, or charitable need (but it cannot spend its money in heavy lobbying), while a 527 organization is exempt because it lobbies to influence elections and is required to disclose its donors.  You can't fault a government institution for doing its job.

On the other hand, however, you have your right-wing and Tea Party groups: most of these groups consist of a mix of tobacco-chewing NASCAR fanatics who still think our President is a Kenyan Muslim socialist from the fiery pits of Hell and well-groomed, wealthy tycoons who, oddly enough, also think our President is a Kenyan Muslim socialist from the fiery pits of Hell.  There's also one other thing they both have in common - their severe dislike of taxes.  A major tenet of Tea Party ideology is the lowering or abolishment of taxes and, for some, the abolishment of the IRS itself.  One could even go so far as to say that the abolishment of taxes would lead to the abolishment of the American government as we know it - without tax revenue, a government cannot provide services to its citizenry, such as smooth roads, fire departments, law enforcement, mass transit, sanitation, and free public education.  The beauty of the government providing these services (and a concept many libertarians and right-wingers do not fully understand) is that the government is not motivated by a profit margin.  As a matter of fact, they should never, ever, ever consider turning a profit on its services, because then the government no longer treats its citizenry as people, but as faceless consumers who are only as important as the dollar bills in their pockets.  Yet, the right-wing factions of our population would rather the private sector run these operations, and who is to stop the private industry, in the spirit of free-market capitalism, from charging you to leave your driveway and drive in your own neighborhood, or bar your children from getting a basic high school education because you cannot afford it?

Given the ethos of these right-wing groups to insist on the abolishment of taxes, as well as their public declaration that they seek to influence elections to achieve that end (as well as many others that seem to be, for lack of a more polite term, "ass-backwards"), it is only reasonable to believe that the Internal Revenue Service, which is charged, by many acts of Congress, to administer the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26 of the U.S. Code), to collect such revenue from the citizenry, and to determine who and what should be exempt from this collection, would take a keen interest as to the tax-exempt status of such organizations, particularly ones looking for 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) status, to make sure laws are being followed.  Any organization who declares that it is a charitable or "social welfare" organization but acts (or intends to act) as a (Super) Political Action Committee, or PAC, just to get out of disclosing their financial benefactors, is actively attempting to flout the law and should be called out by the IRS for doing so.  The Internal Revenue Code, under Section 527, accounts for (Super) PACs, and declares them tax-exempt as long as they publicly disclose who their donors are - which should make you wonder: what exactly are these right-wing organizations so keen to hide from public scrutiny?

As I've said before: this "scandal" is nothing more than a Republican fantasy designed to discredit the Obama administration and to distort the reality of what the IRS is designed to do in order to take attention away from the fact that, by obstructing the proper functioning of government, the Republican Party is effectively committing treason, and this really needs to be nipped in the bud before it infects the collective American consciousness further than it already has.

That's all for today.  Class dismissed.

On Mark Sanford, Charles Ramsey, and Race & Redemption

You can't run away from your past.

But what your past means to you, and for you, isn't the same for everyone. Two key figures in this past week's news stories make this abundantly clear: Mark Sanford and Charles Ramsey.

On Tuesday, Sanford (R) won a special election in South Carolina's First Congressional District and took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He had formerly served as governor of South Carolina until a ridiculous scandal (as in, his behavior was ridiculous, not as in the incident was trivial and should be overlooked) in 2009. Sanford went missing for a week in June -- nobody, not even his Lieutenant governor, knew where he was! -- and it was quickly revealed (indeed, he held a press conference about it) that he was having an affair with a woman in Argentina who he called his "soul mate." His wife later filed for divorce and he was forced to resign first from his post as Chairman of the Republican Governor's Association. He also eventually reimbursed the state for taxpayer money that was used during his time in Argentina on a trade tour in South America. A measure to impeach him as governor failed in the state legislature and he served out his term until 2011. So in sum, the man cheated on his wife, admittedly using taxpayer money to partially fund (and his position as a figure of political power to pave the way for) a meeting with his mistress in Argentina, and went missing from his job, relinquishing his responsibilities as a governor, for a week in order to satisfy his own personal desire to be with his mistress, and still got elected to Congress as a figure of successful redemption.

Then there's Ramsey. On Monday, he and neighbor Angel Cordero broke down the door of the home in which Amanda Berry and her daughter, as well as Georgina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight had been held captive by Ariel Castro. Ramsey has since been turned into an internet meme, so I probably don't need to direct you to the video of his first interview or recount everything he did since Goggle can tell you all you need to know and more. In fact, besides being a hero for helping rescue these women (along with his neighbor Cordero, the police, and Berry herself who vocally reached out and alerted others to her situation), Google can now tell you that Ramsey has a history of domestic violence charges reaching back into the late 90s and early 2000s. So now he finds himself as the hero who was revealed to have a not so heroic past.

The temporal arrangements of these two men's stories are interesting to me. In Sanford's case, his past was known beforehand and his newsworthy event redeemed him, apparently, from that past. In Ramsey's case, he was deemed a hero, and then after this news of his praiseworthy action folks made the point of making his past public, to reveal his domestic abuse from ten years ago. So for him, his actions become redemptive retrospectively.

I know that Ramsey's record was revealed legally and ethically via Freedom of Information Act request. I know that we ought to understand people in their full humanity and not put them up on pedestals for doing one good thing (even if it's really, really good). But what I can't help asking, is, what motivated the desire to know about Ramsey potentially having a criminal past? Why make that call to request that information? What kind of lesson are we supposed to learn here? And why does Ramsey's story become one of a man who was a hero but now is a man with a complicated past who managed to turn his life around, as if he learned some kind of lesson, while the story of Sanford is one of a down and out politician who overcame the odds and triumphantly returned to political power, redeemed and ready to govern? Why is Ramsey's story just a bit less linear and self-verifying than Sanford's? Why is his power relegated to the cultural capital of being an internet meme while Sanford's is transformed into state power?

I am suspicious that (the politics of) race and class have something to do with it. Just like that reporter in the video of Ramsey's first interview who absolutely had to end the interview after Ramsey very astutely made a not so inaccurate despite his joking tone observation about race in America, I am aware that this is the point in the conversation in which most folks will want to steer away from this comparison and say "No no no, race has nothing to do with these interesting juxtapositions. We don't want to talk about race." But what if we do?

What happens when we take seriously the thought that a public eye constructed (through generations of segregation and racism, both personal and structural -- which both still exist, by the way) as fairly whitewashed both (a) wants/needs to see a black hero figure as having a criminal and/or violent and/or morally reprehensible past and (b) wants/needs to see a fallen white political figure as a figure of redemption, rising triumphantly out of the ashes of his transgressions to oppose a black political leader ("For voters, his hawkish views on federal spending, his experience and his promise to fight President Obama outweighed any personal transgressions." -NYT)?

I have my thoughts on this. But I'll end this post here to simply suggest that conversation begins, conversation which takes these questions of race seriously as they consider the discourse around the trajectories of redemption in which Sanford and Ramsey find themselves. 

In the meantime, some recommended reading for consideration during this discussion: "An Open Letter to Charles Ramsey"