When I was in grammar school in Illinois, during World War II, we were definitely not allowed to forget what Decoration Day (as it then was usually called) was all about. One year on the week prior (the day itself then being on a Sunday, of course) we gathered in the auditorium for a program in which an elderly teacher told us of what she had heard from her father and his friends about their experiences in the War of the Rebellion (the name several of my older relatives also knew it by). The assembly closed with everyone joining to sing, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." And at the town parade I shook the hands of two ancients who had fought in the war, more than 75 years before. When we got our first car we drove out to the cemetery where my mother's grandfathers, both veterans of the war, had been buried. A holiday as in holy-day.
Meaning no disrespect to Gen. Logan, but I believe a traditional Decoration Day (apparently originating in the southern Appalachians) long antedated the Civil War tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoration_Day_(tradition)
An article to be shared and an example of how people can change as we are getting some hopeful inkling of that in Washington in our own hard times (not so hard as the civil war, to be sure). Thanks🙏🏻
One interesting bit of trivia I just looked up after reading this post, is that Philadelphia's Logan Square/Logan Circle is named for a *different* Logan.
Also, we're on vacation in rural Norway right now and a ton of shops and activities are closed for Whit Monday (which as an American Jew I'd never heard of until yesterday).
Sherman Ave and N. Sherman Ave in Madison, WI, which both end at the same intersection in a way that suggests they are the same street, are named for two separate people. The former is named for Roger Sherman, the latter for William Tecumseh Sherman.
Thanks for this reminder about the origins of this holiday. It's a weird moment as Trump pushes to build a monument obscuring one of the key viewsheds overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. And, at the same time, the cemetery is running out of room even as it shifts rules for burials considering there are only 95,000 spaces left with 22 million living veterans. I wrote a song about this, asking "Where will they go when there's no more room in Arlington?" https://revkin.substack.com/p/where-will-they-go-when-theres-no?utm_source=publication-search
As Awarru suggested, reserve Arlington burials to line-of-duty deaths. You could hypothetically also buy up residential land near the cemetery to expand it. If it's hard to get people to sell their houses for conversion, it should be at least that hard to get soldiers deployed to combat at the president's discretion.
As a serving veteran with shrapnel still in my hand (currently in uniform in South Korea for an exercise) the answer seems pretty straightforward: just restrict burial privileges, effective immediately, to only line of duty deaths (i.e. including training) and perhaps the occasional general/admiral (at least those that aren't bootlickers or complicit in murder).
If you died safely in your bed, congratulations, you "won" the lottery, thank you for your service, now you get to be buried with your family or at your local National Cemetery through the VA.
100% serious
ETA: Cemeteries, especially new ones or expansions, are a criminal misuse of space in urban areas. The only way an expansion of Arlington should even be considered is if we go to war with China and the PLARF annihilates our carrier battle groups inside the Second Island Chain (of course many of the casualties there would presumably never be recovered) and/or turns Okinawa into a charnel house once again, thus resulting in the requisite thousands of KIA.
We should disinter (and rebury elsewhere) those who never served in combat before we add an inch to Arlington Cemetery. It makes my blood boil to think that an active duty O5 can retire without a day of service in combat and immediately be eligible for burial there.
As a civilian who doesn't know squat about war other than what I've read on ACOUP:
I agree with everything you wrote here *except* the part about disinterring and reburying those already buried at Arlington. It may become a necessity at some point, I get it, but it just feels... kind of icky? Imagine receiving a letter that reads, "Dear sir/madam, your grandpa, who died 40 years after serving in Korea, is getting kicked out of his grave at Arlington. You have n days to claim and collect his remains before we [fill in what to do with unclaimed remains, hopefully it's respectful]. Sincerely, etc." Depending on the circumstances, it may be a huge logistical hassle for the family, and/or may cause them emotional pain. "Thanks a lot, assholes, my beloved Grandpa served a decade in uniform and now you're kicking his bones out of Arlington like they're garbage."
Reburying people is apparently routine in e.g. Switzerland - my Swiss flatmate was astonished when he first encountered a British cemetery with graves dating back to the 1700s. And I'm astonished to learn that Arlington is available for any veteran to be buried in! I'd have guessed it was only for those who died particularly heroically. We take the opposite approach - the Commonwealth War Graves Commission manages tens of thousands of locations across the globe where Commonwealth servicemembers who died in the World Wars are buried. https://www.cwgc.org/
The nation’s premiere military cemetery is at a critical crossroads in its history. Nearly all of the 22 million living armed forces members and veterans are eligible for less than 95,000 remaining burial spaces within these hallowed grounds.
A planned Southern Expansion project will add 37 acres of additional burial space for the nation’s veterans. Southern Expansion includes the area nearest the Air Force Memorial and a part of the former grounds of the Navy Annex. However, expansion alone will not keep Arlington National Cemetery open to new interments well into the future. Without changes to eligibility, Arlington National Cemetery will be full for first burials by the mid-2050s.
“The hard reality is we are running out of space. To keep Arlington National Cemetery open and active well into the future means we have to make some tough decisions that restrict the eligibility,” said Executive Director of Army National Military Cemeteries and Arlington National Cemetery Karen Durham-Aguilera….
“This is a lengthy process, but it’s another opportunity to have a say in what the future of Arlington National Cemetery should be for our nation,” said Durham-Aguilera.
In addition to preserving 1,000 gravesites for current and future Medal of Honor recipients, the following revised eligibility criteria updates were made on September 15, 2020, when the proposed rule was published and the changes more clearly defined.
For below-ground interment:
Killed in action, to include repatriated remains of service members
Award recipients of the Silver Star and above who also have armed conflict service
Recipients of the Purple Heart
Any service member whose death results from “preparations or operations related to combat”, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.
Former prisoners of war
Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States
Veterans with armed conflict service who also served out of uniform as a government official in a position of significant governmental responsibility, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.
For above-ground inurnment:
World War II-era veterans, to include legislated active duty designees
Retirees from the armed forces who are eligible to receive retired pay but are not otherwise for interment
Veterans who have served a minimum of two years on active duty and who have served in armed conflict
Veterans without armed conflict service who have also served out of uniform as a government official in a position of significant governmental responsibility, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.
Why would summer start on the solstice? Shouldn’t the solstice be the midpoint of summer? It makes no sense for the two 2nd longest days of the year to be in different seasons.
It depends on whether you want to define seasons by amount of light or by temperature. Temperature lags behind light (especially when there are major bodies of water nearby, and especially especially if those bodies of water freeze in the winter).
I don’t think the solstice makes sense as the *beginning* of the season even when tracking temperature, but it’s a precise astronomical phenomenon to date from.
But in Australia (and I think some other countries) they start the seasons on the first of the month that contains the solstice or equinox, which seems pretty good to me.
The Celtic calendar does what you like, with the solstice and equinox in the middle, and the dates halfway from one to the next are the starts of the seasons (Groundhog’s day, May Day, and Halloween are the remnants of three of these four days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_days?wprov=sfti1#Ireland)
It's the only objective date that makes sense, and has been the agreed upon date for millenia. All other dates are arbitrary or too early (if you tried to make it the midpoint then summer would start in early May - no thanks).
It also ends on the autumnal equinox, not "labor" day.
And while we are at it, I think we should shift the beginning of the year to the winter solstice - but that's too ambitious even for my fake dictatorship.
By writing dates correctly, of course, you mean year-month-day, so the digits are strictly in order from most significant to least significant, both within a component and between them, and sorting chronologically is trivial.
Name the file what you’d like to call it, then use the metadata to sort. If that won’t work, you’re probably already parsing the string and can handle the date from there. Let the machines format dates in the way that works for them, and let people use the most legible format with least chance for tomfoolery (i.e., this one)
The guy who took advantage of him was more like pre-downfall SBF: wide reputation as a brilliant moneymaking wunderkind with a large orbit of people who knew that without considering him especially dodgy, who was using Grant as a silent partner for the branding. Grant is portrayed as kind of negligently incurious about the underlying business in a way that betrayed people's trust in his name as a voucher for integrity, when in fact his business partner was basically running a Ponzi scheme.
That's bad but probably not indicative of what I would typically think of as "corrupt," -- from the implicit Grant perspective of the biography, it was the Gilded Age stock market. Normal people didn't really have anything to do with stock trading and nothing in Grant's past would have suggested particular familiarity, let alone aptitude, for the relatively opaque profession. Grant was basically just hoping to cash in on his name (and as the book observes, he didn't have a natural alternative income stream) without expecting to contribute anything beyond brand value. The results were bad in retrospect but there was no specific intent to defraud anyone or to knowingly tolerate fraudulence on Grant's part.
I would say it's still a negative mark on his record, but overwhelmingly outweighed by the positives of what he did to win the Civil War, end slavery, and then deliver as much justice as was possible to the freed slaves during Reconstruction. But of course that's tied up in one's fundamental value judgments about how much of a moral imperative it was to end slavery and deliver justice to the freed slaves.
True. Also, those two things were related. One reason why Grant was so good at war was that he was able to express what he wanted from his subordinates in such a clear way. In contrast, Lee lost Gettysburg because he sent an unclear order to Ewell on day 1 of the battle.
To brorrow very losely from Vonnegut on Armistice/Veterans Day, I think Decoration Day has more poetry and gravitas to it than Memorial Day
When I was in grammar school in Illinois, during World War II, we were definitely not allowed to forget what Decoration Day (as it then was usually called) was all about. One year on the week prior (the day itself then being on a Sunday, of course) we gathered in the auditorium for a program in which an elderly teacher told us of what she had heard from her father and his friends about their experiences in the War of the Rebellion (the name several of my older relatives also knew it by). The assembly closed with everyone joining to sing, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." And at the town parade I shook the hands of two ancients who had fought in the war, more than 75 years before. When we got our first car we drove out to the cemetery where my mother's grandfathers, both veterans of the war, had been buried. A holiday as in holy-day.
Note for Philly people: Our Logan Square is named after someone completely different (an 18th-century Mayor of Philadelphia).
hear hear. well said, and well written.
more vignette posts like this, perhaps as part of days like these.
god bless america.
Meaning no disrespect to Gen. Logan, but I believe a traditional Decoration Day (apparently originating in the southern Appalachians) long antedated the Civil War tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoration_Day_(tradition)
I hope everyone will enjoy wearing their white trousers, shoes, and handbags today and for the three months to follow.
Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!
I liked this even though I'm starting to think balkanization is gonna be a regrettable necessity.
An article to be shared and an example of how people can change as we are getting some hopeful inkling of that in Washington in our own hard times (not so hard as the civil war, to be sure). Thanks🙏🏻
Unrelated, but does it bother anyone else that 55+ communities are legal?
I note that on Chicago’s blue line that I am heading past the Logan Square stop on the way to O’Hare
One interesting bit of trivia I just looked up after reading this post, is that Philadelphia's Logan Square/Logan Circle is named for a *different* Logan.
Also, we're on vacation in rural Norway right now and a ton of shops and activities are closed for Whit Monday (which as an American Jew I'd never heard of until yesterday).
Sherman Ave and N. Sherman Ave in Madison, WI, which both end at the same intersection in a way that suggests they are the same street, are named for two separate people. The former is named for Roger Sherman, the latter for William Tecumseh Sherman.
Thanks for this reminder about the origins of this holiday. It's a weird moment as Trump pushes to build a monument obscuring one of the key viewsheds overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. And, at the same time, the cemetery is running out of room even as it shifts rules for burials considering there are only 95,000 spaces left with 22 million living veterans. I wrote a song about this, asking "Where will they go when there's no more room in Arlington?" https://revkin.substack.com/p/where-will-they-go-when-theres-no?utm_source=publication-search
As Awarru suggested, reserve Arlington burials to line-of-duty deaths. You could hypothetically also buy up residential land near the cemetery to expand it. If it's hard to get people to sell their houses for conversion, it should be at least that hard to get soldiers deployed to combat at the president's discretion.
As a serving veteran with shrapnel still in my hand (currently in uniform in South Korea for an exercise) the answer seems pretty straightforward: just restrict burial privileges, effective immediately, to only line of duty deaths (i.e. including training) and perhaps the occasional general/admiral (at least those that aren't bootlickers or complicit in murder).
If you died safely in your bed, congratulations, you "won" the lottery, thank you for your service, now you get to be buried with your family or at your local National Cemetery through the VA.
100% serious
ETA: Cemeteries, especially new ones or expansions, are a criminal misuse of space in urban areas. The only way an expansion of Arlington should even be considered is if we go to war with China and the PLARF annihilates our carrier battle groups inside the Second Island Chain (of course many of the casualties there would presumably never be recovered) and/or turns Okinawa into a charnel house once again, thus resulting in the requisite thousands of KIA.
We should disinter (and rebury elsewhere) those who never served in combat before we add an inch to Arlington Cemetery. It makes my blood boil to think that an active duty O5 can retire without a day of service in combat and immediately be eligible for burial there.
Thank you for your service.
As a civilian who doesn't know squat about war other than what I've read on ACOUP:
I agree with everything you wrote here *except* the part about disinterring and reburying those already buried at Arlington. It may become a necessity at some point, I get it, but it just feels... kind of icky? Imagine receiving a letter that reads, "Dear sir/madam, your grandpa, who died 40 years after serving in Korea, is getting kicked out of his grave at Arlington. You have n days to claim and collect his remains before we [fill in what to do with unclaimed remains, hopefully it's respectful]. Sincerely, etc." Depending on the circumstances, it may be a huge logistical hassle for the family, and/or may cause them emotional pain. "Thanks a lot, assholes, my beloved Grandpa served a decade in uniform and now you're kicking his bones out of Arlington like they're garbage."
Reburying people is apparently routine in e.g. Switzerland - my Swiss flatmate was astonished when he first encountered a British cemetery with graves dating back to the 1700s. And I'm astonished to learn that Arlington is available for any veteran to be buried in! I'd have guessed it was only for those who died particularly heroically. We take the opposite approach - the Commonwealth War Graves Commission manages tens of thousands of locations across the globe where Commonwealth servicemembers who died in the World Wars are buried. https://www.cwgc.org/
That's what was proposed in 2019 (with other details) but the final rule has still not been published. Writing something about this actually. Here's what's pending (and why): https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/About/Proposed-Revised-Eligibility-Criteria
The nation’s premiere military cemetery is at a critical crossroads in its history. Nearly all of the 22 million living armed forces members and veterans are eligible for less than 95,000 remaining burial spaces within these hallowed grounds.
A planned Southern Expansion project will add 37 acres of additional burial space for the nation’s veterans. Southern Expansion includes the area nearest the Air Force Memorial and a part of the former grounds of the Navy Annex. However, expansion alone will not keep Arlington National Cemetery open to new interments well into the future. Without changes to eligibility, Arlington National Cemetery will be full for first burials by the mid-2050s.
“The hard reality is we are running out of space. To keep Arlington National Cemetery open and active well into the future means we have to make some tough decisions that restrict the eligibility,” said Executive Director of Army National Military Cemeteries and Arlington National Cemetery Karen Durham-Aguilera….
“This is a lengthy process, but it’s another opportunity to have a say in what the future of Arlington National Cemetery should be for our nation,” said Durham-Aguilera.
In addition to preserving 1,000 gravesites for current and future Medal of Honor recipients, the following revised eligibility criteria updates were made on September 15, 2020, when the proposed rule was published and the changes more clearly defined.
For below-ground interment:
Killed in action, to include repatriated remains of service members
Award recipients of the Silver Star and above who also have armed conflict service
Recipients of the Purple Heart
Any service member whose death results from “preparations or operations related to combat”, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.
Former prisoners of war
Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States
Veterans with armed conflict service who also served out of uniform as a government official in a position of significant governmental responsibility, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.
For above-ground inurnment:
World War II-era veterans, to include legislated active duty designees
Retirees from the armed forces who are eligible to receive retired pay but are not otherwise for interment
Veterans who have served a minimum of two years on active duty and who have served in armed conflict
Veterans without armed conflict service who have also served out of uniform as a government official in a position of significant governmental responsibility, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.
Also after 100 years your bones get moved to a respectful ossuary. Europe knows how to do it!
Just to be clear, that’s not a joke. America needs to move away from forever cemeteries.
thank you for your service.
If I ever become dictator I will adopt the metric system, writing dates correctly and declare that summer starts on the summer solstice, not in May!
Meteorological Summer is surely more relevant to my life than astronomical summer, and Memorial Day is less than a week from its start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season#Meteorological
Why would summer start on the solstice? Shouldn’t the solstice be the midpoint of summer? It makes no sense for the two 2nd longest days of the year to be in different seasons.
It depends on whether you want to define seasons by amount of light or by temperature. Temperature lags behind light (especially when there are major bodies of water nearby, and especially especially if those bodies of water freeze in the winter).
I don’t think the solstice makes sense as the *beginning* of the season even when tracking temperature, but it’s a precise astronomical phenomenon to date from.
But in Australia (and I think some other countries) they start the seasons on the first of the month that contains the solstice or equinox, which seems pretty good to me.
The Celtic calendar does what you like, with the solstice and equinox in the middle, and the dates halfway from one to the next are the starts of the seasons (Groundhog’s day, May Day, and Halloween are the remnants of three of these four days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_days?wprov=sfti1#Ireland)
I use the Australia method mentally - I'm a December birthday and idea that I'm born in fall has always been crazy to me
It's the only objective date that makes sense, and has been the agreed upon date for millenia. All other dates are arbitrary or too early (if you tried to make it the midpoint then summer would start in early May - no thanks).
It also ends on the autumnal equinox, not "labor" day.
And while we are at it, I think we should shift the beginning of the year to the winter solstice - but that's too ambitious even for my fake dictatorship.
By writing dates correctly, of course, you mean year-month-day, so the digits are strictly in order from most significant to least significant, both within a component and between them, and sorting chronologically is trivial.
Clearly he meant day (#) - month (spelled out or abbreviated) - year (#) e.g., 25May2026. I will die on this hill.
Not good for sorting file names!
Can’t we just get the AI to do all that?
Name the file what you’d like to call it, then use the metadata to sort. If that won’t work, you’re probably already parsing the string and can handle the date from there. Let the machines format dates in the way that works for them, and let people use the most legible format with least chance for tomfoolery (i.e., this one)
This would be an acceptable compromise
I will oppose you vigorously
Was he an apologist for corruption?
He mostly comes off as naive in the Chernow biography. He got taken in by some scamster out of his life savings post-Presidency.
I mean isn't that evidence for corruption? He surrounded himself with so many dodgy people that one took direct advantage of him.
The guy who took advantage of him was more like pre-downfall SBF: wide reputation as a brilliant moneymaking wunderkind with a large orbit of people who knew that without considering him especially dodgy, who was using Grant as a silent partner for the branding. Grant is portrayed as kind of negligently incurious about the underlying business in a way that betrayed people's trust in his name as a voucher for integrity, when in fact his business partner was basically running a Ponzi scheme.
That's bad but probably not indicative of what I would typically think of as "corrupt," -- from the implicit Grant perspective of the biography, it was the Gilded Age stock market. Normal people didn't really have anything to do with stock trading and nothing in Grant's past would have suggested particular familiarity, let alone aptitude, for the relatively opaque profession. Grant was basically just hoping to cash in on his name (and as the book observes, he didn't have a natural alternative income stream) without expecting to contribute anything beyond brand value. The results were bad in retrospect but there was no specific intent to defraud anyone or to knowingly tolerate fraudulence on Grant's part.
I would say it's still a negative mark on his record, but overwhelmingly outweighed by the positives of what he did to win the Civil War, end slavery, and then deliver as much justice as was possible to the freed slaves during Reconstruction. But of course that's tied up in one's fundamental value judgments about how much of a moral imperative it was to end slavery and deliver justice to the freed slaves.
It's worth noting that the common description of Grant is a failure in everything but war. He really did have a mind for little else.
That's deeply unfair - he was quite a capable writer. (His memoirs are still well worth reading.)
True. Also, those two things were related. One reason why Grant was so good at war was that he was able to express what he wanted from his subordinates in such a clear way. In contrast, Lee lost Gettysburg because he sent an unclear order to Ewell on day 1 of the battle.
In the "symbols change meaning over time" category, the goddess of Peace on the Logan monument is holding a fasces.
A visit to Logan Circle anyone?