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 Winston Churchill Day
Day 100 of 2008
266 days left in this year
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HAWAIIAN WORD OF THE DAY — Hana kaua kuapa’a: Slave labor
PIDGIN WORD OF THE DAY— Tok Bilas: Ridicule
HAWAIIAN PROVERB OF THE DAY — “A fine looking mill but no machinery inside.” (Pretty on the outside, dumb as a post inside.)
HAOLE SAYING OF THE DAY — “If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.” (Bulgarian Proverb)
WEB SURF SPOT OF THE WEEK — Maui Hero Project
WEB VIDEO OF THE WEEK — Iraq War Veterans Speak Out
PODCAST OF THE WEEK — Slate.com Podcasts
BLOG OF THE WEEK — BoingBong.com
April 9: 2008: There have been lots of quiet days in April on Maui, and this is one of them: nothing of note much happened on this day.But there is something we can’t let pass by. Hang with it now, you’re gonna love this one. It’s a seemingly innocuous ad attempting to entice tourists to Missouri. Yeah, that Missouri. No, we can’t figure out why anyone would ever want to go there either, but we’ll leave that be for now. We can’t reprint the ad here - that might get us into trouble. But we can sure tell you about it.The ad is part of the visitMO.com campaign. Though it no doubt runs in many other publications, the ad we saw ran inside the front cover of the March/April History Channel Magazine.
The tagline for the ad is this: “Missouri: Close to home. Far from ordinary.” There’s one full-page background color photo, and four small color photos in a line at top with captions. The message, printed in bold letters across the page: “Go someplace new. Like to the 1860s.”
You’ve got to be overwhelmingly stupid or have real guts to run that line. We’re sure someone in Missouri must not be stupid, so we’ll give them credit for guts.
The first small photo is of four yokels dressed as Army types firing a cannon.
The Missouri Compromise was named after this state. The compromise: the country would let Missouri become a slave-holding state, but the south promised not to have slave states north of the Missouri-Arkansas border. Missouri was a multiple personality state: it sent 110,000 troops to the Union Army and 40,000 troops to the Confederate Army. The state had a union and confederate governments which argued and fought with each other, and except for Tennessee, Missouri had more internal battles (one Missourian agin’ another) than any other state during the five year war. It is estimated that more than 60,000 young Missouri boys were killed or crippled defending the state’s right to treat Black humans like animals.
Now why in the hell would you want to go back to Missouri of 1860?
The third photo at top is of smiling children (appearing to be under the age of eight), sitting on porch stairs, all dressed like someone’s idea of the way white kids dressed in 1860 (gingham bonnets and such), and the caption is “Story time!”
It was not uncommon for white babies in the south to be put into the care of slave women, and that included nursing the babies. It was also not uncommon for pre-teen white children to order slaves whipped for what the kids called “insubordination”. No southern state including Missouri had any law against killing your own slaves for no reason. It was akin to slaughtering chickens. Further, if you killed someone else’s slave, you weren’t charged with anything - you were fined, much as if you had cut down your neighbor’s apple tree. You would owe the money the slave owner’s “property” would have earned for him, nothing more.
The large background photo shows a line of a hundred or more rebels in dress shooting their muskets, smoke billowing, faces beaming with smiles, standing on a sunny, grassy knoll.
There were about 115,000 slaves in Missouri in 1860. There was also a much smaller number of free blacks there too. In some districts in Missouri, Blacks were prevented from voting until 1968, more than 100 years after the war. The Southern states vicious defense of indefensible slavery and their “way of life” cost the south 258,000 dead and 137,000 wounded. Sadly, the Union Army - fighting for the high moral ground - lost much more: 342,000 dead and 363,000 wounded.
So, why would ANYONE want to go to the Missouri of 1860?
Well, we know who is NOT going, we know who the ad is not trying to reach, and no surprise. It’s anyone of color. Every single one of the hundreds of people in these photos doesn’t so much as have a tan - this is pure whitebread America. Having fun! Playing the slave-holding, murdering Confederate army! Join them!
Let’s put it where it is: except for that somewhat bizarre steel arch in St. Louis and and a bit of Mark Twain, the whole damn state should just shut up and be quiet. That’s how we will celebrate this day, the anniversary of the death of the Confederacy. Evidently Missouri still hasn’t gotten the memo.
HISTORICAL EVENTS ON THIS DAY — April 9th
- 1831: Robert Jenkins loses an ear, starts war between Britain & Spain
- 1833: First tax-supported public library opens (Peterborough, NH)
- 1865: Federals capture Fort Blakely, Alabama
- 1865: General Robert E Lee, and 26,765 troops, surrender to General Grant at Appomattox Court House, VA (1:30 pm) ending the Civil War
- 1867: The United States buys Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in gold
- 1925: Babe Ruth is rushed to the hospital
- 1928: Mae West makes her NYC debut in a daring new play ?Diamond Lil?
- 1931: Chicago Cy Wentworth beats the Montreal Canadiens at 13:50 of the 6th period
- 1939: Marian Anderson sings before 75,000 at Lincoln Memorial
- 1940: Germany invades Norway & Denmark during World War II
- 1959: First 7 astronauts are presented to the media
- 1962: Arnold Palmer wins his 3rd Masters golf tournament
- 1962: JFK throws out first ball at Washington’s new DC Stadium
- 1963: Winston Churchill becomes first honorary U.S. citizen (posthumously)
- 1965: Beatles ?Ticket to Ride? is released in the UK
- 1967: The first Boeing 737 rolls off the production line
- 1970: Paul McCartney announces the official split-up of the Beatles
- 1971: Ringo releases ?It Don’t Come Easy? in the UK
- 1972: Jack Nicklaus wins the Masters golf tournament
- 1973: Otto Kerner, former governor of Illinois, is convicted for his role in an illegal racetrack scheme
- 1976: U.S. & Russia agree on the size of nuclear tests for peaceful use
- 1978: Gary Player wins his 3rd Masters golf tournament
- 1979: Longest doubles ping-pong match beigns - lasts 101 hours
- 1980: Soyuz 35 carries 2 cosmonauts to Salyut 6
- 1981: U.S. sub George Washington rams the Japanese freighter Nisso Maru
- 1983: 6th Space Shuttle Mission, Challenger 1, returns to Earth
- 1986: TV show ?Dallas? announces it will revive the killed Bobby Ewing character
- 1987: For 3rd time, Wayne Gretzky, scores 7 goals in a Stanley Cup game and surpasses Jean Beliveau as the all-time playoff scoring champ
- 1989: Soviet troops use poison gas on demonstrators in Tbilisi, Georgia; 20 people die, 200 are injured
- 1991: The date of Microsoft MS DOS 5.01992: Former Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega is convicted in Miami of eight drug and racketeering charges
- 1996: Dan Rostenkowski, the once-powerful House Ways and Means chairman, pleads guilty to two mail fraud charges and is sentenced to a 17-month prison term
- 1996: President Clinton signs a line-item veto bill into law (the Supreme Court strikes down the veto as unconstitutional in 1998)
- 2001: The parent company of American Airlines acquires bankrupt Trans World Airlines to become The U.S. #1 carrier
- 2003: On the 21st day of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” citizens of Baghdad come to the U.S. tank-surrounded Firdos Square and pull down the 40-foot statue of Sadam Hussen, while, in other areas of Baghdad, citizens loot government buildings and pockets of resistance continue to battle U.S. forces
BORN ON THIS DAY — April 9th
1926: Hugh Hefner, magazine publisher (Playboy) (82 years ago)
. To summarize the book would do injustice to the Bishop’s wonderfully clear writing, and dull the personal and emotional energy he gives his words.
