May Day Rant

[lydy]

The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day," and I ask all Americans to join me in this day of celebration and in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2003, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance. I also call upon government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Loyalty Day.

Gods, I don't know if I'm more nauseated or infuriated.

May Day is actually a very old tradition. I'm deeply suspicious of anything that alleges to be a "pagan rite." However, May Day appears to be well documented as an ancient celebration of spring and fertility. I'm always suspicious of accounts of how May Day was celebrated in the pre-Christian era. However, it looks like May Day may have started as a Roman tradition. There are records showing that May 1st was celebrated in honor of the Goddess of Flowers (whose name I can't go snatch off the web site I found this at, as it's overloaded). One of the forms of celebration was to decorate the city with flowers. May Day was associated with various goddesses, it would seem, including Maia, wife of Mars (Ares), and Diana the Huntress. For several hundred years at least, it has been a bawdy, exuberant, rowdy, irreverent celebration. I saw the band Steeleye Span in Chicago, once. Maddy Prior, introducing a May Day song, "Padstow", said that she remembered going to a May Day celebration and being flabbergasted by listening to old women, really old women, women as old as, well, women as old as she is now, telling dirty stories and getting drunk.

In the United States, in the 1860s, following the Civil War (no, really, this is all relevant), workers began to organize for an 8 hour work day. In 1886, the Chicago police attacked striking workers, and killed six, on May the First. On May the 4th, a demonstration in Haymarket Square turned violent, and the police killed 8 of the demonstrators. The police claimed that a bomb had gone off, which is why they responded so brutally. The state of Illinois went on to charge, convict, and execute Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer, in a trial that was clearly a show trial, concerned with the political beliefs of the accused, rather than their guilt or innocence regarding the bomb. In Paris in 1889 the International Working Men's Association (the First International) declared May 1st an international working class holiday in commemoration of the Haymarket Martyrs. (As I write this, I wonder how many of my readers will think that a brutal repression of a demonstration is something only to be expected, a normal course of events.)

That was 150 years ago, which is a tolerably long time, certainly long enough to become an established tradition. It was, and still is in many parts of the world, a celebration of the workers, something like our Labor Day, except that May Day celebrates solidarity and group action. You know, "The Union, the guys who brought you the week end."

This country has always been wonky on the subject of unions. While unions clearly have their plusses and their minuses, they have been instrumental in increasing the quality of life for people who have to work for a living. Organizing in order to be a strong enough force to bargain with a large and powerful corporation seems perfectly reasonable to me. A single person doesn't have a lot of leverage. A thousand people do. Excesses? Of course, but don't even start with me. I grew up near Homestead and I went to school with the daughters of coal miners and steel workers. For every abuse or corruption you can cite about labor, I can find 10 for management.

In a neat trick of propaganda during the Red Scare, people became convinced that all socialism was the same as what was going on in the Soviet Union, and that all unions were not merely socialist, but covertly working with the USSR. All of this brings me to:

Loyalty.

I'm not going to go into the loyalty pledges, black balling, McCarthy, or HUAC. There is endless information on the Web, documentaries galore, and whole libraries of books dedicated to the topic. What I will say is that the words "Loyalty Day" instantly remind me of that portion of American history. And that makes me shiver.

Language doesn't determine how we think, but it does influence. "Incline but not compel," so to speak. Public debates have been won and lost by re-labeling an issue, and arguing semantics instead of politics. Propaganda does work, and it works in part through language. My own experience is watching the words "child abuse" come into being in the 70s. Suddenly, there started being words to describe my home life. What had been unthinkable and unspeakable became news and psychology and political movements, and, alas, endless silly stuff. Such is language.

As I said, the US has always been wonky on the topic of unions and organized labor. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established Law Day by Presidential Proclamation. He pre-empted May Day, changed its name, and what a name he chose. It sounds like the key turning in the lock of a prison door. May Day, an irreverent and by its nature anti-authoritarian holiday, is suddenly crushed under the weight of Law and Order. A day that has been, for nearly a human lifetime, a traditional day to protest against oppressive governments and to commemorate the deaths of political activists at the hands of the police magically turned into a day to celebrate those very ideals which our government betrayed most throrougly, in response to the Haymarket Riot. They prostituted the law for their own agenda, made of it rags with which to cover their naked hatred.

So, today is another piece of naming magic. Now, it's Loyalty, not Law. The law is not always enforced fairly, but the rule of law is one of the most important structures necessary for a free society. While it can get dicey here and there, generally people can agree on whether or not I am obeying the law. Who can say if I am loyal? What must I do to be considered loyal? Loyalty is so often a game where the people in control keep on raising the bar, until all the people they don't like are on the other side.

How effective is any of this? How powerful is the renaming of holidays? In all honest truth, I don't know. I do know that back when we had Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday as holidays, specific mentions of those men were always made on those days. You knew who you were celebrating, and sometimes you even got curious enough to find out why. Now that they've been combined, and called "Presidents' Day," I hear nothing about presidents on that day. Is it merely that the times have changed? They still talk about Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday, but then, he's within living memory, which is different. Still, however weak or powerful the naming of days may be, the concept of "Loyalty Day" gives me daymares and nausea.

Happy May Day.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

While I agree with most of your sentiments, as Doug pointed out in Natter, Law Day and Loyalty Day were started by two _different_ congressional actions in 1958. Loyalty Day does indeed go back to 1958 and was first "celebrated" in 1959.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

While I agree with most of your sentiments, as Doug pointed out in Natter, Law Day and Loyalty Day were started by two _different_ congressional actions in 1958. Loyalty Day does indeed go back to 1958 and was first "celebrated" in 1959.

If you are saying that the current political sensibilities and cultural memes are very similar to the 1950s, I'm afraid I'm not much comforted. :-) I'm not ranting about just this one May Day, nor against this one administration, but about an almost 50 year history of a response to a traditional workers celebration, stimulated by xenophobia and jingoism. Because those concepts seem to be coming back into fashion, I am more easily infuriated than previously. However, the very first time I ranted about this was probably 10 years ago. Ask Neil Rest, he might remember.

I grew up in an America that, after much debate, allowed schools to stop requiring the Pledge of Allegiance. I grew up in an America that, very reluctantly, gave student-produced underground newspapers some of the rights of the First Amendment. When I was growing up, there was a general amnesty for men who had dodged the draft by moving to Canada. I remember when police in riot gear beating the hell out of demonstrators was considered to be terrible, a great injustice. When I was young, prisoners were still citizens and still had rights, and the goal of incarceration was rehabilitation. I remember the Congress reacting with horror to the allegations about the coup in Chile, and I remember the restrictions consequently placed on the behavior of the CIA. I remember attempts to rein in the FBI, in the name of decency and privacy. None of these things are true, now. The talk I hear in coffee shops, at work, in letter columns, on the web, is mostly in direct opposition to all those things that I mentioned above. People talk about how we "went too far" in the Sixties, how we crippled the CIA, how privacy must be sacrificed to security, how prison rape is something that is shocking but well deserved by those doing time, how demonstrations that spiral into violence are always the fault of the demonstrators, and that all these things are just what one should expect, and anyone who expects otherwise is naive and politically unrealistic.

The America I grew up in, and the one I believe in, was one where dissent was seen as something which made us stronger, one where our place in the world had moral as well as practical dimensions, and one in which people, citizens and non-citizens, imprisoned or free, were a part of our society and entitled to a basic set of human rights. It was an idealistic rather than realistic view of my country, but it was also something that I believed was a common goal.