On the Command to "Celebrate" ___ [Fill in the Blank]

An alternative title would be, on the observation that “we’re celebrating” this or that.

Is it just me, or have these people lost their minds ?

I celebrate a few things, and the word means something when I say it.

I celebrate my birthday and anyone’s birthday when I’m invited to the party. I’ve never “celebrated” someone’s birthday by myself not at the party. I can think of maybe a couple of exceptions: Once I did a Lincoln reading in the Biola chapel celebrating President’s Day, which is to say, Lincoln’s birthday (and Washington’s). Okay, so dead people are exceptions. I know someone who celebrates, in a genuine way, a deceased child’s birthday. Another exception might be Christmas, but I think that holiday deserves its own paragraph because we don’t normally celebrate it the same way we do a birthday, even though that’s what it is.

Yes, I celebrate a few major holidays: the birth of the United States on July 4th. I celebrate Thanksgiving, giving thanks to the Lord for our country and all he’s doing in a through it. Christmas, as well. I celebrate New Year’s. Sure, that counts. I celebrate Valentimes Day, in a way, but the focus isn’t on the day but on the spouse and the relationship. Same with my anniversary. St. Patrick’s Day is another that I have celebrated only because I happened to walk through a party already happening and so yeah, I guess, “technically” as the kids say, I celebrated that once or twice. I always celebrate Easter.

I don’t celebrate Memorial Day. We remember the fallen, in Horace Bushnell’s phraseology, as our “obligations to the dead.” I personally don’t celebrate Labor Day, but I take advantage of it. And those are not the same thing.

At times, we celebrate one-time events, like a graduation, passing an important test, getting a job, the end of a hard semester, the end of a successful semester, the completion of a book (writing), and so on. We might celebrate getting into a school.

What does it mean to celebrate ? For recurring events, it means, as a discipline, no matter how we feel, we bring before our minds the normative meaning , slicing through the consumer trappings and false cultural layers on top of it, of the day or the event. I may not always feel great on my birthday, but I still celebrate it. Same with the holidays. It doesn’t just mean going with the flow of whatever emotion you have. For one time events (vs holidays that recur regularly), usually the emotions are grand and so it feels as if we’re just going with that emotion, and can feel like that’s what celebrating means. But there’s discipline to it that should come out in the regularized holidays that focus our minds with the result that we have a proper emotion about it, once we have the thoughts and attitude adjusted, over time.

I think pretty much every day of the calendar , and probably every month, has been somehow hijacked by some yahoo telling us, suggesting heavily or not so heavily as the case may be, to celebrate this or that on this month or this day. Often, we have no idea what the hell they’re even talking about. Even for some of the bigger ones, like International Woman’s day: what am I supposed to do for that ? What thoughts am I supposed to have ? What emotion ? What am I supposed to eat ? Are there presents for men on International Woman’s Day ? By the way, are there days for men ? Even if there was, I don’t think I would celebrate that specifically. And, notice, men never came up with such a tacky idea. (If so, what day was it ?)

I follow my alma mater, Defense Language Institute. Their new branding manager on social media did some confusing posts in February cajoling us, commanding us, suggesting to us that we “celebrate” Black History Month.

Any month or day named after an academic discipline like History has my attention, but I’m not sure it’s the kind of attention that Mr. Black History Month comer upper wither had in mind.

I take teaching and professoring seriously. Here’s what I think.

I think we should study history, not celebrate it.

History is what happened. It’s in the realm of IS, in the past tense, not the realm of OUGHT. What happened is a mix of good and bad, probably mostly bad.

Studying history is hard. It’s this odd mixture of the broad sweep and the specific, and it includes grandiosity and a hell of a lot more of the mundane. It’s enough to be required to study it, to try and understand it. But these people weren’t suggesting that. They wanted it to be celebrated.

And here’s what the social media posts, just by way of example, did to “celebrate” Black History Month. They came up with some kind of marketing gimmick with some “content,” a couple paragraphs about the first darker skinned woman to be admitted to and graduate from the United States Naval Academy. This was in the 1970s I believe. There was a comment about how the US Naval Academy wasn’t ready for that. Left out of the paragraphs was any relationship this person had with Defense Language Institute, which is run by the Army and has a totally different mission—to train people in excellence with foreign language acquisition in a short period of time. Also left out was any reason she would want to go to an institution when it was below her standards of being ready for her.

What am I supposed to do, here ? Grab some cake and listen to the Jackie Brown soundtrack while I eat it ? Is that what we mean by “celebrate” ? Or, am I just supposed to admire DLI’s branding¹ in a fresh way , so that I’m celebrating, not Black History, but the product of the branding manager ?

Part of me is interested in the story. I think it’s a likely story, a kind of Rocky theme going on . But I don’t know that she was a great woman. I don’t know anything about her that is more than skin deep. Was she a good person ? I have no idea. She obviously had tenacity. Great ! But do I celebrate it ? No, not really. I also don’t celebrate all of the other people that were at the US Naval Academy that year, who also had tenacity, who I also know what they looked like and not much else besides (like whether they were a good person?)

All I know is that for purposes of some marketing gimmick, those other people’s mere existence at the Naval Academy was not enough to “make” history, let alone make it worth “celebrating.”

The other students were worried about whether they were up to the Academy’s standards—that’s why they went there—not to challenge the Academy, but to be challenged.

I also don’t celebrate all the other things going on in Black History at that very moment in time in the 1970s.²

History per se isn’t something you celebrate, it’s something you study. And studying it, if you’re really doing that, is a pain in the ass. It’s hard. And that’s enough, to study it.

My recent students in an international relations course didn’t know who Richard Nixon was. Let me describe these students: they were bipedal mammals, walking upright, with what evolutionists like Richard Dawkins would call “big brains” (relatively speaking) who’d been alive and conscious for about two decades in a country with the most access to information of any civilization ever in existence. And they didn’t know who Richard Nixon was. He was president, commander in chief, when that woman went to the Naval Academy in 1971.

Is it me, or do we need to go back to studying history ?

Now, if you want to rename February “Celebrate Actually Studying History Month”, sounds great. You got my vote.

Part of the theme I’m going for here is to take our language and our customs (and the customs that a growing number of voices want you to have, as if that’s even possible) just a little bit more seriously.

Putting “Celebrate Native American Month” on a high school bill board, as I saw in Pacific Grove, California last November, is just confusing to kids, and it’s probably why they have that dull look on their face every time they walk by it. They just ignore it. What else are they going to do ? Buy some birthday cake at Safeway up the hill and, with frosting oozing out of the corners of their lips, say flippantly, “here’s to the Chumash ! Thanks !” ?

I recently read the following sentence in a book from Monterey—it was about flora and fauna, redwoods and such, in the area . “The original Native Americans came over the Bering Straight…”

So, “native” means born in or originated from. These Indians were born probably in Siberia over on the Russian side, but they were native to America ? How so exactly ?

These buzzwords, slogans and such are so sloppy, smart people say stupid things.

Not to mention, I’m native American. Here’s how that works: I was born in Colorado. I’m a native Coloradan. But Colorado is in America. Therefore, I’m native American.

But I’m not an American Indian, because I’m not ethnically Indian.

And how far back do we go for this celebration ? What exactly are we celebrating. There’s lots of bad things back there in History.

How about we study it ?

That would be something to celebrate.

1. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that DLI’s branding was solid before these social media posts. It was about academic excellence in language acquisition while maintaining military bearing. That was plenty enough, and they had it cornered. Why water that down ?

2. Black History also includes murders and bad stuff like that. Right ? If it were so called white history, that’s the first thing people would say. And they’d be right, which is why we don’t have White History anything, and properly never have. History is history. And it’s inceasingly unknown. How can we be asked to celebrate what we don’t understand, and how