In November of 2006, Bill Moyers was asked to give the Sol Feinstone Lecture on The Meaning of Freedom, an endowed serial event for the men and women cadets of West Point.

It is an amazing speech to read, and it should warm the hearts of all liberals that West Pointers are being exposed to material like that Bill Moyers chose to honor them with.

I suppose I could, and perhaps should, leave the link and let you go and read it, but I’ve decided to highlight certain aspects of Moyers’ lecture, although you should still go and read the extended excerpt published at TOM PAINE from which I am working.  Read more 

Ladies and gentlemen and others, a moment of your time, please, in memory of one man who died at 22 — and whose story stands for unnumbered others.

His name was Merlin German. He enlisted in the United States Marines at the age of 17. Within a year he was in Iraq. He spent nearly three years setting an example of survival — one even his doctors had trouble believing; and then, one more surgery, one more graft, became one too many.
On Memorial Day, let him be remembered.  Read more 

Image of music and lyrics from the electronic edition of Slave Songs of the United States.

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The standard accepted “ending date” for the Civil War is April 9, 1865, the day the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.

It didn’t end there, of course. The immediate postwar period had the chaos that follows all such massive conflict and major change; such periods are imbued with even more of the “we’re making this up as we go along” quality as all of history does. Decisions made in such times can set the course of all time to come.

I’m going to bet you’ve never heard of this very early, if not indeed the first, Memorial Day service, because I hadn’t and I follow such things fairly closely. The excellent Kevin Levin, recounts the scene as told by David Blight, perhaps the premier scholar of the early Reconstruction period working today:

After Charleston, South Carolina was evacuated in February 1865 near the end of the Civil War, most of the people remaining among the ruins of the city were thousands of blacks. During the final eight months of the war, Charleston had been bombarded by Union batteries and gunboats, and much of its magnificent architecture lay in ruin. Also during the final months of war the Confederates had converted the Planters’ Race Course (a horse track) into a prison in which some 257 Union soldiers had died and were thrown into a mass grave behind the grandstand.

In April, more than twenty black carpenters and laborers went to the gravesite, reinterred the bodies in proper graves, built a tall fence around the cemetery enclosure one hundred yards long, and built an archway over an entrance. On the archway they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.” And with great organization, on May 1, 1865, the black folk of Charleston, in cooperation with white missionaries, teachers, and Union troops, conducted an extraordinary parade of approximately ten thousand people.  Read more 

What to remember, what to memorialize, who to thank, and for what, including the making of war?

Xan rightly spends time trying to imagine the unimaginable agony of civilian victims of a military atrocity; read it here and weep.

In this war, we can be grateful that attempts to portray dissidents about war policy as undermining our troops, unAmerican, and desirous of an American defeat haven’t worked.

Why so many on the right are so determined to believe that fully half of Americans are traitors is the real mystery, (although Kevin Baker’s article on the June issue of Harper’s Magazines, “Stab In The Back” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, and more than worthy of the price of the magazines, which also features Art Speigelman on those Danish cartoons).

We aren’t traitors. We care deeply about our military, what happens to it, how it behaves, for what uses and causes it is employed.

What I usually do on Memorial day is to re-read Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d;” Yes, that Wal Whitman - a more-or-less openly Gay man, who spent the Civil War years in service to the wounded: You can find a copy of it here.

Even on Memorial Day, cannot we also remember to what terrible ends even a “good war” can take us?  Read more