Perhaps you’re already aware that the word holiday is actually a contracted equivalent for holy day. And perhaps it troubles you just as much as it does me that the federal BLEEP!ing government takes it upon itself to declare new ones, entirely to placate noisy interest groups. We dodged one a few years back, when the greeting-card companies attempted to push “Grandmothers’ Day” on us. It didn’t work; the association was too overt. But this “Juneteenth” business…
Yes, it has me in a lather. The Usurper Administration is on a vote-buying spree; this is only one manifestation thereof. But it’s an egregious one, arguably worse than the Usurpers’ attempts to buy the youth vote by “canceling” student-loan debt.
Juneteenth, also known as Juneteenth Independence Day or Freedom Day, is a holiday that commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas in June 1865, and more generally the emancipation of African-American slaves throughout the Confederate South. Celebrated on June 19, the term is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth and is recognized as a state holiday or special day of observance in most states.
This points up a little-known and less-understood aspect of the famous Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. As a diktat that was issued by the Union side in the midst of the Civil War, it had no effect on districts still in rebellion until the Confederate surrender. Districts that had already fallen to the Union forces at the time of the Proclamation were few: Tennessee, parts of Virginia, and parts of Louisiana. Moreover, the four slave states that had not joined the rebellion – Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware – were not affected at all.
The Proclamation was essentially a political move. Its principal legal effect was to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act. (The complete nationwide abolition of slavery waited for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on December 6, 1865.) Its hoped-for practical effect was to encourage slaves in the Confederate states to flee to Union states, increasing the disorder in the Confederacy.
But on June 19, 1865, with the surrender of the Confederacy already two months past, the formerly Confederate state of Texas announced that the slaves of Texan masters were free. Thus we have “Juneteenth,” a silly name for a silly “holiday.”
But it’s a federal holiday, which means that federal employees will get the day off with pay. Not that having them at work is actually vital to the nation, mind you. State and local employees will get that paid day off too, so quotidian services such as street cleaning and pothole repair will have to wait. Then again, when don’t they?
And, like the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s a political stroke. The Usurpers are in a panic about the defection of Negro voters from the Democrats to the Republicans. Apparently Lyndon Baines Johnson’s prognostication (“I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years”) may not have been perfectly accurate. So the Usurpers have thrown American blacks a sop: a new holiday.
Do I sound unusually cynical? I do feel that way. Every time I become convinced that our political class has hit the moral-ethical bottom, they whip out a bigger shovel. After a while, the belief that things will only continue to get worse becomes deeply embedded. (NB: It’s not a conviction that they can’t get better; it’s the certainty that they won’t.)
There’s an irony here, too, and you know your Curmudgeon Emeritus: he’s always on the lookout for a healthy irony. To whom have the Democrats chosen to pander? Why, the thirteen percent of the American people responsible for the greater part of its crime and disorder! Hearken to Arthur Sido:
[It’s] the weekend before Juneteenth, a celebration of White people letting slaves go free and then watching the descendants of those freed slaves royally fuck up the country White people built. Since the inception of Juneteenth as a new Federal holiday in an attempt to placate blacks so they would stop burning down cities, there have been plenty of mass shootings accompanying the “holiday”. We have already had our first of 2024.
[…]
Never in the history of human kind has a group been given so much freedom and opportunity only to squander and spit on that freedom and opportunity quite like American blacks.
But give them their own holiday! Why not, after all? We’ve already given them de facto legal immunity for rioting and pillage. We’ve already given them “affirmative action.” We’ve already given them guaranteed places in every new movie and television drama (often as paramours to white women, and what do black women think of that?). What’s a new federal holiday compared to all that, if it might keep them voting Democrat?
What, indeed…unless it’s the last straw, the final cleavage point, the one that finally persuades the white majority that it has had enough.
What was it Herbert Stein said? If something cannot continue indefinitely, it will…do what?
Perform your own prognostications. I have mine. And I hope most passionately that I won’t live to see them come to pass.
