By kind permission of SMBC Comics. “Fixing Social Media”
Some time ago, George wrote about my faulty blog list:
Pulled up your profile page and started checking out all the blogs you have listed there. Half of them exist but are empty, half of them haven’t had anything posted for years, and half of them post so sporadically, I wonder why they bother. Yes, I know, too many halves.
Reminds me I should go clean up my own link lists, and I will. Any day now.
BTW, I didn’t check George’s links.
Despite some hyperbole, he was correct that a handful of the websites I linked to were dead. Easily remedied.
The bigger problem was the nearly two dozen that hadn’t published anything in a long while. My difficulty is that, in many cases, I had encouraged those people to start or continue their blogs, commenting frequently. So, I had a degree of ownership in the process. Often, they were my friends and good acquaintances.
I suppose the blogroll is an archaic relic of years past, when blogging was cool. As mentioned, I would pore through my friend Fred Hembeck’s roster of links when I started blogging in 2005. I made several blogger buddies, some of whom I’m still in contact with. BTW, Fred’s list is now a historic record.
Still, I made the painful decision to zap the blog links that hadn’t been updated in the past two years. Afterward, I remembered that I didn’t have to DELETE them; I could just make them invisible. D’oh!
Add the daughter
On the other hand, I’ve added my daughter’s student portfolio from Hampshire College for Fall 2022 – Spring 2026. It was an exercise she initially did for one class but ultimately created for her whole college tenure.
Come back, Shane
All of this is to say that if you would like me to link to your blog/webpage, please let me know, especially if I have previously linked to it.
Oh, one exception to my purge of links. I’ve kept the Schomburg Center Black Liberation Reading List of 95 books because it’s still useful.
Also, my high school classmate Armen Boyajian, who started following my blog during COVID, has a YouTube channel. He died at the end of 2022; I see no reason to take his page off the list.
The weekend before she graduated from college, the Daughter came home. It happened to be Mother’s Day. Since it was Tulip Festival weekend, with its requisite traffic jam, my wife and I took the bus to church. Afterward, my daughter drove my wife’s car a couple of blocks away from church, across from the Washington Avenue branch of the Albany Public Library.
We went out to a nice place for pizza and other Italian dishes, leaving plenty of leftovers. My wife and daughter visited my MIL, while I talked to my sisters on ZOOM. As it turned out, my MIL was sleeping most of the time during that visit, and my daughter nodded off as well.
It got to be after 9 pm, with my daughter finishing a binge of the ABC procedural High Potential. I knew what my wife was thinking, so I said it out loud. “Do you want to sleep over tonight and go back in the morning?” And she did have to return by Monday morning because one of her tasks at one of the other Five Colleges was to put in three hours of cleaning the art rooms.
Wisdom
The Daughter said what I knew to be true. Her driving at 9:30 pm was her prime time. Her mother and I were projecting OUR sleep patterns. Moreover, if she had driven back early in the morning, the sunrise would be in her eyes much of the way. I realized, yet again, she’s not us. And she has generally made good decisions in these situations.
My wife asked her to text ME when the Daughter arrived, knowing full well that my wife would be asleep by the time the return trip was completed. And two hours later, I get the minimalist “HERE.” I gave a thumbs up.
the first Decoration Day has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day
Major Martin R. Delany was a surgeon and the highest-ranking black soldier serving in the Civil War.
How Memorial Day Was Stripped of Its African-American Roots is a link that an old blogger buddy named Demeur left as a comment on my May 2013 blog post. Unfortunately, the link is dead.
FORTUNATELY, I can retrieve it via the Wayback Machine. Written by Ben Becker. Tags: CC, fair use, trending
What we now know as Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. It was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause.
These days, Memorial Day is arranged as a day “without politics”—a general patriotic celebration of all soldiers and veterans, regardless of the nature of the wars in which they participated. This is the opposite of how the day emerged, with explicitly partisan motivations, to celebrate those who fought for justice and liberation.
The concept that the population must “remember the sacrifice” of U.S. service members, without a critical reflection on the wars themselves, did not emerge by accident. It came about in the Jim Crow period as the Northern and Southern ruling classes sought to reunite the country around apolitical mourning, which required erasing the “divisive” issues of slavery and Black citizenship. These issues had been at the heart of the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Return to politics?
To truly honor Memorial Day means putting the politics back in. It means reviving the visions of emancipation and liberation that animated the first Decoration Days. It means celebrating those who have fought for justice, while exposing the cruel manipulation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members who have been sent to fight and die in wars for conquest and empire.
As the U.S. Civil War came to a close in April 1865, Union troops entered the city of Charleston, S.C., where four years prior the war had begun. While white residents had largely fled the city, Black residents of Charleston remained to celebrate and welcome the troops, who included the Twenty-First Colored Infantry. Their celebration on May 1, 1865, the first “Decoration Day,” later became Memorial Day.
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 28 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.”
Unforgettable parade
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 freed people. 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 a.m. on May 1, the procession stepped off, led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads 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 gathered in the cemetery enclosure; a children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture.
The Battle Over The Memory of the Civil War
Blight’s award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) explained how three “overall visions of Civil War memory collided” in the decades after the war.
The first was the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ remembrances and the politics of Radical Reconstruction, in which the Civil War was understood principally as a war for the destruction of slavery and the liberation of African Americans to achieve full citizenship.
The second was the reconciliationist vision, ostensibly less political, which focused on honoring the dead on both sides, respecting their sacrifice, and the reunion of the country.
The third was the white supremacist vision, which was either openly pro-Confederate or at least despising of Reconstruction as “Black rule” in the South.
Over the late 1800s and the early 1900s, in the context of Jim Crow and the complete subordination of Black political participation, the second and third visions largely combined. The emancipationist version of the Civil War, and the heroic participation of African Americans in their own liberation, was erased from popular culture, the history books, and official commemoration.
The end of Reconstruction
In 1877, the Northern capitalist establishment decisively turned its back on Reconstruction, striking a deal with the old slavocracy to return the South to white supremacist rule in exchange for the South’s acceptance of capitalist expansion. This political and economic deal was reflected in how the war was commemorated. Just as the reunion of the Northern and Southern ruling classes was based on the elimination of Black political participation, the way the Civil War became officially remembered—through the invention of Memorial Day—was based on the elimination of the Black veteran and the liberated slave.
The spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.
As Blight explains, “With time, in the North, the war’s two great results—black freedom and the preservation of the Union—were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquely Confederate version of the war’s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruction, coalesced around Memorial Day practice.” (“Race and Reunion,” p. 65)
The Civil War Whitewashed
In the statues, anniversary parades, and popular magazines, the Civil War was portrayed as an all-white affair, a tragic conflict between brothers. To the extent the role of slavery was allowed in these remembrances, Lincoln was typically portrayed as the beneficent liberator standing above the kneeling slave.
The mere image of the fighting Black soldier pierced through this particular “memory,” which in reality was a collective and forced “forgetting” of the real past. Portraying the rebellious slave or Black soldier would unmask the Civil War as a life-and-death struggle against slavery, a true social revolution, and a reminder of the political promises that had been betrayed.
While African Americans and white radicals continued to uphold the emancipationist remembrance of the Civil War during the following decades—as exemplified by W.E.B. DuBois’ landmark “Black Reconstruction”—this interpretation was effectively silenced in the “respectable” circles of academia, mainstream politics, and popular culture. The white supremacist and reconciliationist retelling of the war and Reconstruction was only overthrown in official academic circles in the 1950s and 1960s as the Civil Rights movement shook the country to its core, and more African Americans fought their way into the country’s universities.
While historians have gone a long way to expose the white supremacist history of the Civil War and uncover its revolutionary content, the spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.
So let’s use Memorial Day weekend to honor the fallen fighters for justice worldwide, to speak plainly about this country’s historic crimes, and rededicate ourselves to take on those of the present.
“Americans now experience war more as an economic abstraction than a human catastrophe.”
Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!
Since it’s the Memorial Day weekend, we’re going to keep this simple. On us all! The first question came courtesy of AI, so Sunday Stealing is Artificial.
Before that, though, a link to a piece by Jeffery L. Degner titled Memorial Day and Remote War: Has Our Nation Lost Its Capacity to Mourn?
Memorial Day Questions
1) What freedom are you most grateful for?
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” And by extension, the 14th Amendment restricts states from making or enforcing laws that abridge the privileges and immunities of U.S. citizens.
I take my freedom of religion and YOUR right NOT to be forced into religious ideology to be fundamental. This is why I rail against Christian nationalism. This is why I exercise my freedom of speech, my right to protest, and my need to bug my elected officials.
2) What book are you currently reading?
African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley, 1778-1990, by Emerson I. Moss. The Wyoming Valley, BTW, is an area in northcentral Pennsylvania that includes Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. I have a personal connection to the book, which I will discuss when I present a book review on Tuesday, July 7, at 2 pm at the Washington Avenue branch of the Albany Public Library. Inevitably, I will subsequently post some version of the book review on this blog.
Music
3) What have you been listening to?
Seals and Crofts. Dash Crofts of the duo died in March 2026; Jim Seals had died in 2022. Dash had the less pretty voice, as heard in Dust On My Saddle and Yellow Dirt. I saw the duo in NYC on November 12, 1971.
Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which “follows the NYPD’s elite Major Case Squad as they investigate high-profile crimes using advanced behavioral psychology, while also revealing how each crime was planned and carried out from the perpetrators’ point of view.” It ran from 2001 to 2011. Of the 195 episodes, about 70% featured Kathryn Erbe as Detective Alexandra ‘Alex’ Eames and Vincent D’Onofrio as Detective Robert ‘Bobby’ Goren. Quirky doesn’t begin to describe Goren. In the final season, Julia Ormond played Goren’s shrink. Other episodes featured performers such as Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Nicholson.
Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.
Here’s the answer to a trivia question you may have never thought of. “Belafonte is the second studio album by American recording artist Harry Belafonte, released by RCA Victor in late 1955. The album was the first number one on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart, topping it for six weeks before being knocked from the top spot by Elvis Presley’s self-titled debut album, also issued by RCA Victor.”
Here’s a playlist, not in song order, and a Spotify roster, which IS in order, plus a bonus track of La Bamba.
This confused me. There were albums before 1956, weren’t there? From Joel Whitburn’s The Billboard Albums: Billboard magazine began publishing a top five popular albums chart in 1945. This chart was published on a sporadic basis until the week of March 24th, 1956, when the chart first appeared weekly on a consistent basis.”
My father was a big Belafonte fan when I was growing up, so I became one too for a time.
The weekend before she graduated from college, the Daughter came home. It happened to be Mother’s Day. Since it was 
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