That title may read as a peculiarity, but I see no reason why Memorial Day can't be stretched out to fill a week here on the ol blog, so I'll scour the net for Memorial Day related bits and pieces to fill the time and space here until I think of something to write myself. So without further ado, I give your our 26th president, on Memorial Day, 1916 in St. Louis, discussing then, what we find our current crop of politicians discussing today (okay, so maybe that intro wasn't exactly "without further ado, I apologize for misleading you):
"I appeal to all our citizens, no matter from what land their forefathers came, to keep this ever in mind, and to shun with scorn and contempt the sinister intriguers and mischiefmakers who would seek to divide them along lines of creed, or birthplace, or of national origin...The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to a breed of spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens. If some citizens band together as German-Americans or Irish-Americans, then after a while others are certain to band together as English-Americans or Scandinavian-Americans, and every such banding together, every attempt to make for political purposes a German-American alliance or a Scandinavian-American alliance, means down at the bottom an effort against the interest of straight-out American citizenship, an effort to bring into our nation the bitter Old World rivalries amd jealousies and hatreds."
Then the next year, on the 4th of July, this:
"We must have in this country but one flag, and for the speech of the people but one language, the English language. During the present war all newspapers published in German, or in the speech of any of our foes, should be required to publish, side by side with the foreign text, columns in English containing the exact translation of everything said in the foreign language. Ultimately this should be done with all newspapers published in foreign languages in this country."
I think this one is particularly interesting because the other day on a local radio program an irate caller made the point that while our English-language television news programs use the SAP (secondary audio program) function so Spanish-speakers can hear/read (via captioning) what is being said on the English-language broadcasts, there is no such feature from Spanish (or any other language) to English, so we English-only speakers have no real idea how the issues of the day are being framed on Spanish-language television; naturally this came up on the radio in discussing the most recent Congressional immigration proposal, but certainly it goes to other issues/events. If we believe the news coverages shapes/frames how the viewer/public look at and understand things, how are we to know what those who prefer their news in Spanish think? Really, the underlying question was, I believe, is or is not Telemundo part of the "liberal media"?
And if none of that interests you, how about this? The amazing first trailer for the fourth and "final" installment in Sylvester Stallone's Rambo franchise. It starts out a little slow, setting up plot outline and back story, but around 1:45-2:00, you begin to understand why there is a 100% chance this film will be awesome when it releases, sometime around Memorial Day 2008.
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