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.

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.

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.

The Funny Papers

Dave Whamond, Jack Ohman, Ed Wexler, Bill Bramhall, JD Crowe, Nick Anderson, Drew Sheneman, Ed Hall, John Deering, Mike Thompson, Clay Bennett, Ted Littleford, Matt Wuerker, David Cohen, Mike Luckovich, Michael de Adder

Republicans Fist Bump Over Screwing Veterans Out Of Healthcare

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democrats, comedian and activist Jon Stewart, a great many Americans, and me, all over Twitter, railed against a group of Senate Republicans who voted against legislation to help veterans suffering from ailments related to toxic burn pits.

The PACT Act, which the House passed earlier this month, would enable additional healthcare coverage for more than three million veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits and Vietnam-era veterans exposed to the deadly herbicide Agent Orange. The House passed the PACT Act by a 342-88 vote about a month after the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 84-14. But this week the Senate had to retake the bill up because the House passed some minor changes in its version, and that’s when Republicans held out their middle finger to our vets..

We send these men and women off to wear to fight and when they come home, we, well, the GOP mostly, turn our back on them, as Jon Stewart pointed out:

"So ain't this a bitch? America's heroes, who fought our wars, outside sweating their asses off, with oxygen battling all kinds of ailments, while these motherf**kers sit in the air conditioning walled off from any of it? They don't have to hear it. They don't have to see it. They don't have to understand that these are human beings. Did you get it yet? [If] this is America First, then America is f**ked. … I'm used to lies. I'm used to hypocrisy. I'm used to their cowardice. I'm not used to the cruelty, the casual cruelty ... a bill they had fought for, for more than a decade."

Stewart lays a great deal of blame at, who else but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who, he says, lied to veterans by saying "we'll get it done" and then voting against the bill. He also criticized Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican retiring at the end of his term:

"Pat Toomey didn't lose his job. He's walking away. God knows what kind of pot of gold he's stepping into to lobby this government to shit on more people. I'm used to all of it, but I'm not used to the cruelty. Senator Toomey is not going to hear that because he won't sit down with [Veterans] because he is a f**king coward. You hear me? None of them will hear it. And none of them will care. What just makes the gut punch that much more devastating is that these people all came down here so that they could finally tell the men and”—Stewart started to tear up—"Their constituents are dying. And they're gonna get it done after recess? You don't … tell their cancer to take a recess, tell their cancer to stay home and go visit their families."

Stewart apologized for his foul language, but then outlined what the senators were voting against, with a veteran saying the bill "gives them health care, gives them benefits, lets them live from become an addict, keeps veterans from committing suicide."

It’s that simple.

Pat Toomey declined to comment on Stewart's earlier criticism, saying:

"That's not worth responding to."

Veterans’ healthcare being denied is not worth responding to, because Toomey is leaving his cushy job and literally does not give a fuck; this whole ‘No’ vote was a slap to veterans because the GOP did not want to give Biden, via the Democrats, a win, as you could see when Republicans stood in the Senate chamber and fist-bumped denying healthcare to our veterans; they cheered.

It’s clear, as I Tweeted out over the weekend, remembering the GOIP cheering the end of Roe v Wade, the GOP refusing to acknowledge the heroic efforts by DC and Capitol Police on 1/6, and many in the GOP vowing to end marriage equality:

They spit in the faces of heroes and women and the LGBTQ+ community, and children being slaughtered in schools. What will it take for some of you to see that the GOP doesn’t represent We The People, doesn’t stand for this country?

They represent only their own interests, their own bank accounts, and their own party,

November is coming … CAST A GODDAMNED VOTE.

PS In addition to voting against veterans, women and the LGBTQ+ community, they also voted against codifying same-sex marriage, and interracial marriage, into law, voted against contraception, and voted against sending out Amber Alerts when there's an active shooter. 

Tuesday Thought #1

Bobservations

Carlos and I rarely fight. Oh, we have disagreements and discussions, but they hardly ever escalate into some sort of yelling kinda thing; we generally agree on most things, and those that we don’t, well, in the end, he does it my way. I kid; we just compromise. But … after his recent hernia surgery, I  made it clear he wasn’t to lift anything, and that included dogs and cats; he even slept in the guest room, door closed, to keep the cats from jumping on him.

We had his follow-up appointment with the surgeon last week, who was pleased with Carlos’ progress and happy he had very little pain. He gave the ‘OK’ for Carlos to resume playing the trumpet but cautioned him against lifting anything over twenty pounds for the next month or so.

And that’s the rub … we did the groceries and he tried to carry the bags. I reminded him that I would be carrying the bags, and once we got home, he could put things away. We went to CostCo and, again, he tried lifting a box filled with groceries and again I reminded him that I would be carry the boxes and once we got home, he could put things away. We also bought dog food—a fifty-pound bag because it was the only one they had—and AGAIN he tried to lift the bag and yada yada yada … We left the bag in the car because it was too big for the Pet Food Cupboard™, but on Sunday, I heard him in the garage, in the car, opening the back, and then coming inside.

He is NOT carrying that dog food, I thought. And then I heard the bag open and heard the contents being emptied into another container for storage and I went mad. But I held it in. I calmly did my thing. I went into the kitchen to fix dinner and when he came in, I got mad all over again, and  to cover my anger I threw a spoon into the sink from across the room.

“Is something wrong?” He said oh … so … sweetly.

5 … 4… 3 … 2 … 1

"QUIT FUCKING LIFTING THINGS! THE DOCTOR TOLD YOU NOT TO LIFT ANYTHING, AND I’VE TOLD YOU TO LET ME DO IT AND YOU WON’T LISTEN. STOP PICKING STUFF UP!!”

“But I feel—”

“NO ONE CARES HOW YOU FEEL! YOU’RE NOT A DOCTOR! I DON’T WANT YOU TO HAVE TO UNDERGO SURGERY AGAIN JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU’RE SMARTER THAMN A DOCTOR. YOU’RE NOT.

“STOP.LIFTING.THINGS.”

Then I asked if he wanted chopped scallions on his soup, because once the rage was released, I was in a good mood.

Carlos, on the other hand, hasn’t lifted another thing.

A Straight Pride group held their event in Dallas over the weekend and … three people showed up.

So, either there are only three straight people in Dallas, or the people of Dallas see a ridiculous stunt when it advertises on Facebook. Which was where the anti-LGBTQ Straight Pride group Protecting Our Next Generations [PONG] promised to discuss abortion [hint: it’s murder], marriage values [hint: Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve or Madam and Eve] and genders [hint: there are just two].

PS Two of the men that showed up were from Boston and the third was a Proud Boy from Hateville, USA, so not a single person living in Dallas stopped by.

Go figure.

Speaking of dumb homophobes, a _____ supporter in Minneapolis left an ignorant comment about a  gay bar after _____ held a rally in that city last month, and her ignorance went viral.

The gay bar in question, the Saloon nightclub, protested BLOTUS by flying the giant _____ baby balloon from its rooftop and this irritated _____ supporters so much that one, Pamela Ogletree, took to Twitter to proclaim that Saloon would no longer be getting her business.

A commenter asked: “Were you a frequent visitor??”

And one finally told her: “Cuz it’s a gay bar, Pamela.”

And suddenly a meme was born; one person turned the phrase, “It’s a gay bar, Pamela,” into a rainbow-colored enamel pin—it’s available for $10 with 50% of proceeds going to Out Front Minnesota, the state’s leading LGBTQ organization. T-shirts were made; signs posted; Tweets sent out.

“It’s a gay bar, Pamela” is the new “That’s so dumb.”

Pamela Ogletree has not responded to media requests seeking to understand how long she’d patronized the Saloon before it “lost her business.”

Deplorables are dumb.

Last Summer _____ said he would be pursuing gun control measures after a series of shootings in El Paso and Dayton. This fall he quietly dropped the plan because he was told it would hurt his election chances.

Earlier this Fall, he said he would meet with representatives of the vaping industry to try and stem the deaths from vaping. Now he’s shelved those plans, too, because, again,it would hurt his election chances.

Plainly: _____ wants guns and vaping to continue no matter how many are injured or killed because his winning reelection is more important than human life,

That’s all.

Last week, Lil Nas X became the first out gay musician, and rapper, to take home a Country Music Association Award when he and collaborator Billy Ray Cyrus won the “Musical Event of the Year” trophy for the remix of “Old Town Road,” which spent an unprecedented 20 weeks at # 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. They beat out the duo of Brooks & Dunn, the duo of Garth Brooks and Blake Shelton, and the group of Maren Morris and the Brothers Osborne.

Although Lil Nas X is the first gay musician to win a CMA for his own song, it isn’t the first time the show has handed out an award to an LGBTQ+ person. Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally both won for co-writing Kacey Musgraves’ LGBTQ+ anthem “Follow Your Arrow” in 2014. 

Still ….

Jon Bon Jovi is hot; younger and older; hot and hot. And compassionate.

Bon Jovi dedicated his newest song “Unbroken” to honor veterans suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]), but he also, through his JBJ Soul Foundation, donated $500,000 to help build the Walter Reed facility in Washington DC for the homeless veterans.

The new facility expects 300 residents and offers a small gym, a courtyard, and a computer room. Residents can use the lounge as a meeting place among the occupants or when their family somes for a visit.

In another effort to help support veterans suffering from PTSD, all the proceeds from Bon Jovi’s song “Unbroken” will be donated to the Patriotic Service Dog Foundation, where veterans and first responders get to be paired with service dogs.

Jon Bon Jovi also owns and runs two Soul Kitchen restaurants in New Jersey where people in need can get a meal, and pay only what they can afford.

Hot, and compassionate.

Less hot, and less compassionate, and entirely full of crap, Dave Cathy’s Christian-owned Chick-fil-A has promised to stop giving to anti-LGBTQ charities, a vow it has made at least once before, and broken.

Don’t hold your breath, and don’t eat their crap chicken.

And finally, Isaac Churchill.

I don’t know much about him except that he’s a dreamy model with luscious hair …and lips, and really doesn’t mind taking his clothes off.

Oh, and I believe he lives in Milan. Dreamy.

The Funny Papers

Kevin Siers, Christopher Weyant, Clay Bennett, Darrin Bell, Phil Hands, Steve Sack, Drew Sheneman, Jack Ohman, Mike Luckovich, Michael de Adder, Steve Benson