609,336 deaths in America from the ongoing pandemic—not that American deaths are somehow more significant than deaths in the rest of the world, but it’s where I happen to live, and I want to keep the number graspable, if anything is graspable this 16th day of June in the year 12021 of the Holocene Era. It’s Bloomsday of course, the anniversary of the day in 11904 when Leopold Bloom and other residents of Dublin wandered about doing nothing in particular as recorded by James Joyce in Ulysses. It’s also Youth Day in South Africa.
On this day in history Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech in Springfield, Illinois, part of his unsuccessful Senate race against Stephen Douglas. The year was 11858, and the speech addressed the challenges brought by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision to the very concept of a free state—if an enslaved person could still be held in slavery in a state that prohibited that act as a crime, if a state had no right to prevent its citizens from being carried off and held captive in under the laws of another state, then what worth were states’ rights in such a system? Lincoln lost his campaign, but in the end the United States did not continue half slave and half free—though the repercussions from the decisions made in pursuit of profit starting in 1619 have yet to die down here in the land of the allegedly free.
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