Tuesdays with Claymore

The DU tale about Memorial Day’s beginnings stands in total contrast to the day’s actual beginnings. The knucklehead writes that the day, originally Decoration Day, was altogether political and argues that politics needs to be reinserted into Memorial Day. He could be more wrong, but only if he misspelled Memorial. There are a few competing, reasonable and credible explanations for how Decoration Day began but not one is political. That doesn’t matter to the DUers who claim, in so many words, to have learned something new from the knucklehead. Cripes.

So, for the benefit of anyone who might read this, the best explanation for Decoration Day’s birth traces to a cemetery in Columbus, Mississippi where some local women placed flowers upon the graves of Fallen soldiers in 1866. The women came upon some graves of union soldiers, too, and not only decorated them with flowers but wrote to the soldiers’ families to let them know where their loved ones lay. (Many of the war dead had Fallen at Shiloh and were transported to Mississippi for final burial.) That event—the decorating of graves–was reported in the New York Tribune and, a year later, in 1867, appeared as an introduction of sorts atop a poem entitled “The Blue and Gray” that was published in the Atlantic Monthly. The poem, by French Miles Finch, a Yale-educated Northerner who became a judge—remains the best known poem of Decoration/Memorial Day. It is apolitical and honors the Fallen of both sides. Its last two lines are these: “Love and tears for the Blue, Tears and love for the Gray.”

“Exacerbating this trend is something I call ‘negative intersectionality'” writes one DUer addressing who knows what. Negative intersectionality? I’m pretty sure he stole that from Professor Irwin Corey.