News, Notes, and Notions for 26May2024
Thoughts for a Memorial Day Weekend, plus latest Heard Tell episode, my media apperances, and things worth your time reading as you reflect and enjoy the holiday
Since it is Memorial Day weekend, wanted to reup something I wrote back in 2018 about the overseas cemeteries:
America will be celebrating Memorial Day…Along with an extended weekend, folks’ thoughts will turn to the meaning of the holiday: honoring the fallen of American conflicts. But over 216K of them are buried or memorialized as missing in foreign lands. It brings to mind a long held sentiment, expressed well by then Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003:
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we’ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace.
The scale of the ground needed to bury them, administrated by the American Battle Monuments Commission, is perhaps lesser known:
ABMC administers, operates and maintains 26 permanent American military cemeteries and 29 federal memorial, monuments and markers, which are located in 16 foreign countries, the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the British Dependency of Gibraltar; three of the memorials are located within the United States. These cemeteries and memorials, most of which commemorate the service and sacrifice of Americans who served in World War I and World War II, are among the most beautiful and meticulously maintained shrines in the world. Visit ABMC Burial and Memorialization Statistics to learn about the number of men and women we honor around the world.
The exact number of dead who remain forever on foreign lands, will probably never be known:
Similarly is Brookwood American Cemetery outside of London. It’s a communal cemetery, meaning non-Americans and non-war dead can be buried there. On a tour with the cemetery’s assistant director, Dickon was shown a wooded area far from the American portion. “He pointed to a bunch of gravestones and he said, ‘There’s a bunch of Americans over there that Americans don’t know about.’” In his research, Dickon found they were mostly Americans who had joined the British Royal Air Force or the Royal Canadian Air Force, but had been buried as Canadians or Brits.
Towards the end of WWI, 200 Americans were killed in Archangel, Russia. The transport ship Lake Daraga made three trips to bring home the dead between 1919, 1929 and 1934, but the records from the original voyage have been lost.
“An unknown number remain in Arctic Russia, unnamed because the list of those returned on the Lake Daraga in 1919 can’t be found,” Dickon wrote on his site. “Though it is possible to name all who died, it is not possible to name all who were returned.”
Bringing home the dead is a relatively new undertaking for the U.S. government.In the nation’s early years, most troops were buried where they fell. For some highly decorated officers, remains could be collected and sent back, but only if the family covered all the costs — which could be steep given they had to buy and ship a lead-lined coffin to meet the military’s requirements.
But the unprecedented scale of WWI meant an increasing number of families were pressing the government to remove that financial burden.
“The U.S. didn’t know how to bring back the fallen when the war ended,” said Tim Nolsal, public affairs director for the American Battle Monument Commission or ABMC.
Opinion, he said, was divided: some felt the bodies should be brought back to the U.S. Others felt it was honorable for soldiers to stay on the battleground. Ultimately, “the government decided to make it a decision for the next of kin,” Nolsal said. The family could have the body repatriated and buried in a national cemetery, or buried overseas in a national cemetery. Either way, the government picked up the costs. Only if the family decided on a private burial would the government only cover the costs of transportation and a headstone.
Across 10 countries, more than 130,000 Americans are buried and another 124,000 missing in action are memorialized by name in one of the 25 cemeteries overseen by the ABMC. They are mostly casualties of the world wars, Nosal says, because the option to be buried overseas ended during the Korean War. The missing in action include the Korean and Vietnam wars.
“Now, we bring everybody back,” Nosal said.
If you have never been to one of the overseas cemeteries, it is truly a moving thing. Places like the Normandy one, situated on the cliffs overlooking the beaches of the Overlord operation that started the march to Berlin and made famous by Saving Private Ryan…are striking places. Most of the cemeteries in Europe are places that once you walk into and amongst the markers, you quickly lose yourself in a sea of white stone monuments that seem endless. It is an experience that truly changes the meaning of things like Memorial Day.
Every year on Memorial Day, I reup a thread of these places worldwide on Twitter that you can see her:
Last year for Memorial Day, I wrote this for the Fayette Tribune:
The long running joke turned meme from the movie Titanic has the elderly Rose character exclaiming “It’s been 84 years…” before recounting the fictionalized story of the famous real life sinking ship.
Donald Robert McCloud beat it by two years. The Navy Fire Controlman who died aboard the U.S.S. Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was laid to rest along the West Fork of Twelvepole Creek in Mingo County. Four score and two, and half a world later, DNA testing finally identified McCloud, who was then laid to rest on Armed Forces Day, May 20, 2023.
With Memorial Day weekend comes many things. One of the busiest travel days of the year. Millions of workers get a three-or-more day weekend. Schools are wrapping up, graduates are graduating, and the holiday has long been the widely considered start of summer. A holiday synonymous with cookouts, travel, vacations, leisure, fun, family and the like.
It would be easy to forget what the holiday was meant to be. Armed Forces Day is for the currently serving. Veterans Day is for those who have served. Since the end of the Civil War, Memorial Day in its various forms is for those that not only served, but paid the ultimate price in doing so.
From 1775 until the present day, the number of military fatalities in major conflicts should be more than just statistics. 620,000 died in the American Civil War, where failings and hatred led to a bloodletting greater than all other conflicts before or since. World War 2 saw 405,000 Americans give their lives in the fight against the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and their supporters. The First World War took the lives of 116,000 Americans. Another 58,000 fell in Vietnam, 36,000 before that in Korea, 25,000 during the American Revolution and another 20,000 in the War of 1812. More recently, over 7,000 Americans paid the ultimate price serving our country in the post-9/11 conflicts. And thousands of others have sacrificed in hundreds of places over the last two and a half centuries.
While many are known, there are an untold number who, like Donald McCloud before being identified, are unknown. The Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington is dedicated to them, part of America’s most hallowed ground at Arlington National Cemetery. But that isn’t the only final resting place for the known and unknown of America’s war dead. The American Battle Monuments Commission oversees 26 permanent American military cemeteries and 32 federal memorials, monuments, markers, and sites scattered across 17 foreign countries, one U.S. commonwealth, and British Gibraltar.
Walking among the seemingly endless rows of white markers at any of the cemeteries is unspeakably moving. The dignified uniformity and meticulous care of the surroundings contrasts with the sheer number of graves neatly arranged. Walking among such places, whether in Arlington, Virginia or Normandy, France, or Luxembourg, or dozens of others, drives home the human cost of the “freedom isn’t free” sloganeering.
Reflection is called for on Memorial Day weekend. While it is good and proper to celebrate the freedom we have with family, fun, friends and food, somewhere in there the honored dead of a grateful nation should get more thought than just a social media post or easily recited saying. Such a holiday is a good time to use the powerful devices in the palms of our hands to do something other than share cat pictures and yell at each other over politics. We can quickly look up, read, watch videos, and otherwise spend a little time learning about those who went before but never came home: Those who bore the battle and left behind widows and orphans, as Lincoln phrased it when creating the Veterans Administration; those like Donald McCloud who died on the other side of the world, far from home; and for those that, unlike McCloud, still lack having their names recorded by history to honor their sacrifice.
Memorial Day weekend should be a good time to be an American. Find a few moments in there to also make it a meaningful one. Our honored dead shouldn’t have to wait for that.
Have a great Memorial Day with you and yours, and slide some thankfulness and reflection in amongst the good things we enjoy because of the sacrifice of others.
Latest Heard Tell Episodes:
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Your Heard Tell Show is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern our times by talking about news media and social media, and how we consume it. Host Andrew Donaldson uses his own experiences as a writer and talking head on news programs to talk about the changing ecosystem of news media, Pew data on local vs national news, how social media changes everything about our information intake, affirmation vs information, and some practical things everyone can do to take charge of their news feeds, social media timelines, and information rotation.
All that and more on this episode of Heard Tell.
The Pew data Andrew talks about can be found here:
The End on a Good Note story about Major can be found here:
Download and listen to Heard Tell wherever you get your podcasts:
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Your Heard Tell Show is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern our times by talking about President Joe Biden's trip to Atlanta to campaign and deliver the commence address at Morehouse College, which brought national media attention and ongoing narratives. We skip all that and turn to Donnel Suggs, Editor-in-Chief of the Atlanta Voice who covers the black community in Atlanta that President Biden was seeking to reach out and campaign to. Donnell explains the background of Morehouse College and why it carries such significance in the black community, the protests and narratives that came from the president's speech and campaign stops, takes us behind the scenes of being in the reporting pool for a presidential visit, and talks the differences between local coverage and national reporters who come just for the big story. Plus, we talk about the importance of local journalism during an election year, ask if the black community is getting talked to or talked at by the campaign, the importance of HBCUs in that community, and how to cover a growing place like Atlanta undergoing generational and rapid change.
All that and more on this episode of Heard Tell.
Read Isiah Singleton's piece on President Biden at Morehouse here:
Read Donnell Suggs coverage of Spelman College here.
Read Laura Nwogu piece on Georgia Tech graduation here.
My Latest Media Appearances:
I’m on for the first half hour of The Dave Allen Show, but if you’ve followed the CPS situation in West Virginia, which we covered on Heard Tell here, stick for the second half where the great Amelia Kinsely updates some truly disturbing developments in the case of the dead, emaciated 14 year old girl, the elderly patient scalded to death in a state hospital, and a state government that refuses to answer any questions about any of it.
Coop is filling in for Dave and he has a full show. Andrew Donaldson from the Heard Tell Show, Fayetteville trib, et al. will be by in first to discuss media literacy and local primary sourcing; then Amelia Kinsely from WV Watch (https://buff.ly/3QWDRCV) on recent CPS and DHHS fallout and tension from high profile child and patient deaths.
I did some commentary for The News Forum up in Canada on the Uvalde lawsuits. My bit is at the 16:25 mark:
Since I was talking Uvalde here, I’ve told folks often the hardest media hit I’ve ever done to date was the one I’m embedding below during the Uvalde shooting. As the news first started breaking about the Uvalde school shootings, Talk Radio & Talk TV in the UK wanted some live commentary and reached out to Young Voices, who suggested me. Note this is while we are still figuring out what really happened and just two hours after the gunman was finally put down, so see how the commentary held up. Most interesting, and I purposefully was asked to do this, is the UK audience has an enormous disconnect to how gun laws and our 2nd Amendment work, which gets brought up quickly here and I try to explain it in the little bit of time I have to do so. The video for the TV side doesn’t seeem to be still available but here is the audio from 24May2022 on UK’s Talk Radio channel.
Worth Reading:
The New York Times interactive graphics folks take a stab and the most pressing issue of our time: How big is Taylor Swift:
It may be impossible to do an exact, one-to-one comparison between Swift’s career and that of the Beatles — or Madonna, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John or your icon of choice. Besides music being personal and subjective, the nature of success (and how it is calculated) has changed drastically over time. Much of a star’s grip on the zeitgeist is also intangible — a vibe in the air, their influence moving subtly but undeniably through culture.
But the absence of a truly scientific comparison has never stopped the amusement that comes from the eternal sports and pop culture debates of our time: Jordan vs. LeBron (or Kareem, or Kobe). Brady vs. Montana (or Marino, or Mahomes). “Star Wars” vs. “Star Trek” (or Harry Potter, or the Marvel Universe).
Even without definitive conclusions, it’s impossible for certain loyalists, haters and obsessives not to wonder how giants match up using whatever evidence might be available.
So with Swift’s career still peaking late into its second decade, we ran the numbers and analyzed the data, taking stock of what she has accomplished so far — and when — alongside some of the heaviest hitters in each category.
“We want jobs-no not that kind” in this piece from David Thornton:
It seems that the good folks of red Georgia counties don’t want any jobs foisted on them by Democratic senators.
One of my favorite comments was the poster who screamed across the keyboard in all caps and with no punctuation, “KEEP IT IN CHINA WE DONT NEED THIS HERE.”
Now, my county voted for Trump by 74 percent in 2020, and I’ll guarantee you that most of the people in this Facebook group approve of Trump’s trade war with China and the goal of returning manufacturing to America. (Manufacturing never really left, by the way. US manufacturing hit an all-time high in 2023. We just build more with fewer workers.)
Do you see the inconsistency? They want to bring more manufacturing to the US, but they don’t want the factories that come with bringing more manufacturing to the US. The acronym “NIMBY,” which stands for “not in my backyard,” applies perfectly here.
A response to the China post illustrates this, as a commenter argued, “We definitely don’t need in China either, but not here, maybe North Dakota where we have a crap load of land.”
“Or west Nebraska,” the original commenter agreed.
So we don’t want China to have the plant after all, just not here. Put it in North Dakota or Nebraska.
The obvious problem with those options is the lack of a large, educated workforce. That and those states are where we grow food. Do we really want to destroy farmland to build factories?
Many of these people probably don’t realize that Governor Brian Kemp almost certainly had a hand in attempting to steer the plant to Georgia. The development is almost certainly a bipartisan effort with the Biden Administration’s CHIPS Act likely providing some impetus to move the semiconductor industry into the US and Gov. Kemp’s efforts at workforce development and higher education helping to prepare the labor pool.
Be careful what you wish for. If you want to increase American manufacturing, you’re going to have to have more factories. And factories have to be close to workers.
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