Friday 29th of March 2024

happy fourth of july, guys (and dolls)...

fourthfourth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Sunday, Americans from sea to shining sea mark Independence Day, commemorating the 4 July, 1776 declaration of independence from the British Empire. On the anniversary of the holiday, Sputnik explores some of the iconic symbols which the modern world commonly associates with the United States.

 


245 years ago, the leaders of the thirteen American colonies signed the declaration of independence, formally casting off British rule and establishing a constitutional republic. In the centuries since, the country has used a combination of economic might, military conquest and cultural and diplomatic soft power to spread its influence to every corner of the globe, with a number of symbols, products and cultural products coming to be seen as quintessentially American.

Statue of Liberty

For much of the 20th century, the Statue of Liberty overlooking New York harbour served as one of the America’s most iconic symbols. Largely paid for by France and built by French artisans and craftsman, the statue arrived in the United States in 1885 in 214 separate boxes consisting of 300 pieces.

The statue wears size 879 sandals and has an 11 meter waistline, and according to popular legend, sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi modeled its face after his mother, and the body after a mistress of his. Gustave Eiffel, the world-famous engineer best known for the Eiffel Tower, also took part in the project, creating the primary support structure hidden within the statue. Originally, the statue's copper plating gave it a brown colouring. However, with time, oxidation turned it green, with this iconic green being the colour people associate with the statue today.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/society/202107041083306937-lady-liberty-hamburgers-jeans-and-jazz-origin-stories-of-americas-most-recognizable-symbols/

 

 

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patriotic education...

 

It’s been a tough year for 1776.

On Jan. 6, rioters entered the U.S. Capitol, some waving 13-starred “1776” flags. Two weeks later, President Trump’s 1776 Commission issued its report calling for “patriotic education,” which painted progressives as enemies of the timeless values of the founding.

And in recent months, “1776” has been a rallying cry for conservative activists taking the fight against critical race theory to local school boards across the country, further turning an emblem of national identity into a culture-war battering ram.

These efforts have drawn condemnation from many of the nation’s historians, who see them as attempts to suppress honest discussion of the past, and play down the role race and slavery have played in shaping the nation from the beginning. But as planning for America’s 250th birthday in 2026 gets underway, some historians are also asking if the story they tell of the founding has gotten too dark.

For scholars, the rosy tale of a purely heroic unleashing of freedom may be long gone. But does America still need a version of its origin story it can love?

 

The story historians tell about the American Revolution has changed enormously since the Bicentennial. Uplifting biographies of the founding fathers may still rule the best-seller list (and Broadway). But these days, scholars depict the Revolution less as a glorious liberty struggle than as a hyper-violent civil war that divided virtually every segment of colonial society against itself, and left many African Americans and Native Americans worse off, and less free.

Today’s historians aren’t in the business of writing neat origin stories — complexity, context and contingency are their watchwords. But in civic life, where we stake our beginnings matters.

“Every nation has to have a story,” said Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian at Harvard whose new book “On Juneteenth” parses the elisions and simplifications at the heart of various origin narratives.

“We’re arguing now about the content of that story, and finding the balance,” she said. “If you think the United States was a good idea, you don’t want people to think the whole effort was for nothing, or was meaningless or malign.”

In a recent essay about teaching the American Revolution, Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Harvard, argued that historians need to do more to shore up “our fragile democracy.” The “latest, best scholarship,” she writes, “is brave and fresh and true, all of which is necessary. But it is not, in the end, sufficient.”

And it’s a problem that Kamensky — the lead historian for Educating for American Democracy, a new cross-ideological civics education initiative launched last spring — believes has only grown more urgent.

“We as a profession are very invested in originality, which means toppling,” she said. “I think originality also means discovery and building. We ignore history’s responsibility to help plot a way forward at our peril.”

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/arts/1776-2026-A-DIFFERENT-STORY.html

democratic holidays...

 

Patriotism is a form of piety. This makes tricky terrain for religious types. When the state’s highest holy day falls on a day typically belonging to the Lord, as it does this year, the footing becomes particularly uncertain. How do we allow pious expression to admit some patriotism on such an occasion?

 

Whether or not the United States is a Christian nation remains debatable. Pious Puritans butt up against the bland deistic fronts of the Founding Fathers, and Christians still struggle to live as faithful citizens of both the secular state and the heavenly City. Those who would like a more sanctified celebration of patriotism have gravitated to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Debuted by Kate Smith in 1938, this brief collection of rhymes succeeds in bringing a bit of devotion to one’s patriotic duty. The impulse is laudable, so far as it goes. It is analogous to a mealtime prayer, acknowledging that the founder of the feast is neither the person who paid for it, nor the person who prepared it. For religious adherents, fealty with reference to a nation is ultimately owed to the power beyond that nation whose will (whether permissive or active) allows the nation to exist.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/god-bless-america/ 

 

 

democratic blessings and holidays…

 

The author of the piece above on “god bless America” has a fixation with water skiing… But apart from the conflict between the Fourth of July celebrations and god’s day, Sunday, on one occasion, her democratic values are limited to her Christian beliefs. 

 

 

Here in Australia, we celebrate the 26th of January, which was the official day of stealing a continent from its original inhabitants and the destruction of their civilisation to replace it with a penal colony… Great start. Talking about conflicts, this is a mega one. So should we instead celebrate the formation of this unified country into a Federation of states on FEDERATION DAY? With actors looking like the founding fathers and women with umbrellas? Sure, this would make more sense. But this would conflict with the first of January celebrations for the Neww Yearrrr… Bummmmer. We could not have a firework to celebrate two things at once, could we?

 

We in Aussieland are somewhat lazy and any day off-work to celebrate something is catering to this tendency. We even celebrate the Queen’s birthday on the WRONG DATE just to have a Monday off and give a few dudes some accolades in the form of AOs, OAMs and other expensive medals, for services to pumping anything from shit to glory and charitable enterprises. Now you know why the country is still full of loony royalists...

 

Here I think we should celebrate the New Year on the First of July — which is the start of a new taxation year. And we still should have a holiday on the 26th of January for some songs and dances with Didgeridoo music. Water skiing optional. As well, we should make Melbourne Cup day a National holiday, instead of just a Victorian selfish work-off, while ALL THE NATION is betting on a horse. As well each state should celebrate the date of their nomination of statehood… Then we’ll have Kanbra Day for good measure, with the usual sexism on display.

 

We should commemorate 26 September 1983 with Slacko Day (remember Bob: I'll tell you what … any boss who sacks anyone today for not turning up is a bum...) when Australia II beat the Yankee boat in Newport, USA in the America’s Cup races… But because of time difference, we’d celebrate this momentous day on 27th September in this country. As well, we should also commemorate the day Alan Bond, the owner of Australia II, went to prison for whatever embezzlements, now forgotten in the fog of historical blancmange… Another day to commemorate is the official launch of the Endeavour replica, a boat itself started with Bond’s embezzled cash.

 

The Eureka Stockade comes to mind, as well as Ned Kelly’s hanging for a good piss up day, not to mention the ends and beginnings of wars… The list of days to loaf about is endless and we wonder why we can’t manufacture our own thongs...

 

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cancelling the past...

 

Happy Fourth of July! Falls Church in Northern Virginia just renamed two public schools, George Mason High School and Thomas Jefferson Elementary, to cancel the men who gave us this day.

The namesake George Mason was a Founder, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the basis for the Bill of Rights. Nearby George Mason University is still named after him, but Falls Church is stripping his name from its schools because in addition to all he did to create the United States, he was a slaveholder. Same for Thomas Jefferson, Founder, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, first secretary of State, third president of the United States, and famously, rapist and slaveholder, Joker without the makeup.

The people of Falls Church who made these changes probably mean well in a 2021-ish kind of way. The city is 72 percent white (and only 4.5 percent black.) An amazing 78 percent of adults in Falls Church have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and most work for the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C. (George Washington and six other presidents held slaves.) The city has an energetic farmer’s market with a proposal pending to add an “informational booth about how communities of color have less access to healthy foods” and votes solidly Democrat.

The process of canceling the Founders was deliberate, with 13 meetings stretching over a year to come up with final school name candidates. For the high school, only one name candidate related to history at all, a local spot where the first rural branch of the NAACP was located. The other choices were could-be-anywhere Meridian (the eventual winner), Metropolitan High School, Metro View, and West End.

 

Same for deleting Jefferson. The same local historical site came up, as did the name of a local white historical figure who started a special needs school. The winner, Oak Street Elementary, “recognizes how trees are important natural elements.”

What stands out is a devotion to keeping the point out of the renaming. As political as the motivation was, no one wanted an MLK high school, or a Rosa Parks elementary. Sally Hemmings, Jefferson’s rape victim and slave, did not make the cut. Truth and Justice Elementary School was seen as a “nod” to Jefferson and thus truth and justice were rejected.

 

Left undiscussed is how the renamed Thomas Jefferson Elementary School still abuts George Mason Road. The renamed George Mason High School itself is located on Leesburg Pike, near Custis Parkway, named for the slave owning daughter of George Washington’s adopted son and the wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It is hard to get away from history.

At this point it is tempting to drive over to Whole Foods, park among the herd of Priuses and smite the too-earnest people of Falls Church with their own PBS tote bags. A wealthy, nearly all white community making a splash about renaming two schools to cancel a couple of Founding Fathers while carefully avoiding any teachable moment. Everyone’s white liberal guilt is assuaged with few feathers ruffled. And did you see the new artisanal cheeses in aisle eleven? Carol sent another $50 to the ACLU for us after George Floyd, you know.

 

The thing is as hard as it is to take these people seriously, it is equally hard to not take them seriously. They really believe themselves. And that poses 2021’s question.

America did not invent slavery, racism, or discrimination. We can point to a moral struggle hundreds of years in process including a civil war that remains the most costly conflict to Americans in body count and brutality. The Founders struggled over how to deal with a system most knew was unsustainable, Jefferson among them.

Yet alone in history we haven’t figured this out. South Africa, with an apartheid system designed to be as plainly racist as possible, found a way to untangle itself. The ancient world was built on slave labor and made the transition. The Germans dealt with their relatively recent attempt not just at enslavement but industrial scale genocide.

We fail because we refuse to admit crying racism, and making faux-fixes as in Falls Church, is as profitable politically as doing racist things is. Getting yourself elected calling out racism with manufactured rage is not far away from using racist voting laws to get yourself elected. There is too much to gain by maintaining and then exploiting a racist system. If you heal the patient, what’s left for the doctors to do?

There is also what we’ll now call the Falls Church myth, this near-idiotic belief insignificant changes add up to something. Changing the name of a school, or tearing down a statue, does not change history. That is why everyone is still “raising awareness” about the same problems after decades. It feels good, though.

Same for the “first…” people, the ones who celebrate the first black this or the first woman that. That we chased that idea all the way into the Oval Office and two consecutive black attorneys general and a black V.P. to see nothing much come of it answers the question of what it is worth as a change tool.

We thrive on polarization, thinking somehow calling someone a white supremacist based on little more than his skin color or political party is going to…help? The critical catechism of MLK and the civil rights movement—that race should not matter—is turned on itself to humiliate those who struggled. Sorry folks, it turns out it is all about the color after all, except that we mean black people should get stuff for being black.

Alongside are the scorekeepers. These people point out since about 13 percent of us are black, anything that has less than that (colleges, jobs) or more than that (prisons, poverty) is racist. The simplicity is attractive but the reality of ignoring the complexity of every other factor is where the argument fails hard. At the risk of offense, it is not just black and white out there.

I used to walk past the statue of Marion Sims in Central Park. When I first looked him up in 2012, he was the father of modern gynecology, the founder of New York’s first women’s hospital, the 19th century surgeon who perfected a technique that today still saves the lives of third-world women.

When I checked his biography again in 2018, he had become a racist misogynist who conducted medical experiments without anesthesia on enslaved women. His statue was removed from Central Park while protesters chanted their “ancestors can rest” and “believe black women.” I’m glad they just got rid of the statue instead of putting up a modern plaque “explaining” it in woke-talk.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/we-have-to-face-history-no-matter-how-hard-we-try-to-erase-it/

 

Read from top.

 

 

May be we should stop remembering altogether... except: August 5 2021…

it's trump fault...

Happy Birthday, America! Today, July 4, 2021, we turn 245 years old. You might think we’d have trouble blowing out all the candles on the cake, but fortunately we can use the downdraft from the Sikorsky S-97 Raider, a new prototype attack helicopter with two rotors that spin in opposite directions.

And now that we’re 245, it seems as though we should be old enough to take an honest look at various dumb and awful things about our birth, and stop believing in preposterous myths.

While the American Revolution officially began at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts in April 1775, for some time afterward complete separation from Great Britain was only supported by a fervent minority. However, nothing works as well as killing and being killed to make everyone believe the other side are irredeemable monsters. By June 1776, public sentiment favored a total break.

 

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2021/07/04/at-245-america-is-old-enough-to-be-honest-about-its-founding/

 

We need to mention that the double rotor chopper has been in use in Russia for nearly 30 years (first flight in 1983 — in full combat mode 1995). I say "it's Trump's fault" because having elected a dork in the position of President of the USA, it forced the Americans to look at their Bauchnabel and do some navel-gazing... The fluff in there is not pretty. So to some extend, Trump was the necessary idiot for the US to discover they had boils on their arse. And Trump might come back in a second coming...

 

Read from top and visit: August 5 2021…