Let's join together, people, and hold hands
The Column: 06.02.25
The world is advancing at a rapid pace and it’s hard to keep up. Last weekend, I learned about a liquid hand soap that smells like fresh-cut grass, an Earl Grey ice cream, and an app that when you snap a picture of a tree with your phone, it will tell you it’s a catalpa and the bird singing in it is a tufted titmouse.
Earl Grey is a tea, not an ice cream, just as Jim Clothes is what it is and would you make ice cream that tastes of perspiration?
But the tree and bird app strikes me as heading down a treacherous road. People go to college to study forestry or ornithology and if it’s all available on your phone, what will we do with all the buildings with the pillars in front? Turn them into Halls of Fame? Mortuaries? Probably there is an architecture app that tells you if the recess in a building is a nook, cranny, cove, crypt, carrel, or apse. Perhaps a medical app to examine people’s laps and say if they’re likely to collapse. With AI hovering in the wings, ready to simulate writing, probably a sixth-grade education will be enough for anybody. But sixth-graders playing football is nothing that millions of Americans will wish to watch. We may need to go back to public stonings for our entertainment.
My grandma dearly wanted to attend the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 so she could hear the human voice recorded on discs and ride the Ferris wheel, but now innovations come so fast that by the time you organized a fair, it’d be an antique show.
The ice cream shop that sold Earl Grey was on the main drag of Chester, Connecticut, a town that strives to look as Colonial as possible: no Walmart, no FedEx, no Apple store or Whole Foods, just a string of little craft shops and cafes. A hamburger is $15, to keep out the riffraff. You can buy artisanal lace curtains and handcrafted candles but for dental care you’d need to leave the 18th century and drive to a contemporary town.
I bought a cone with two scoops of vanilla. I’ve accepted my own vanillaness for years. Back in the Seventies when independence was in vogue, people wore buttons and badges and T-shirts with humorous or meaningful or symbolic inscriptions to demonstrate individuality, and guys I knew who’d once followed the Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy model, grew their hair down to their shoulders and wrote fractured poetry and attempted to be Buddhist. But they had to face the fact that good jobs for Buddhist poets are hard to find and you may spend your 20s living in your parents’ basement.
Not a good idea unless the parents are wealthy and own numerous homes and you can live in the basement of one they’re not occupying.
My parent weren’t wealthy and they were fundamentalists and I was brought up to keep my distance from unbelievers, so I was painfully independent through childhood and in my adult life I longed to belong to the majority. I loved popular songs, I adopted a dreamy liberal point of view, observed the Fourth, and went to ball games and stood with the others and sang the national anthem.
I went to a graduation ceremony in May and a soprano did the anthem in her key and we listened as she hit a high C on “free” and I realized I haven’t heard a crowd sing it since I was a kid.
Maybe people are put off by the rockets and bombs, I don’t know. But I believe America needs an anthem. So I’ve rewritten it. Wherever you are reading this, at the breakfast table or on a bus or in a cafeteria, I’d like you to sing it aloud, softly, to the tune you know quite well. Just do it.
O say, can you see
From the Florida shore
To the vast open plains
And the mountains of Utah,
From Yellowstone Park to Columbia Gorge
To the hills of Fairbanks
And the beaches of Maui.
And Washington’s halls and Niagara Falls
The beauty of forest and farmland calls,
O say, don’t you love this land you must save,
The land of the free and the home of the brave. It isn’t Woke, it’s not about America First, it is to some extent about Diversity in that the plains and the gorge and Fairbanks and Maui are distinctly different.
You’re welcome.
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We already have what could be/should be a national anthem. It begins, "Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea." Or we might try, "This land is your land. This land is my land. From California to the New York islands, from the redwood forests to the Gulf stream waters, this land was made for you and me."
Or, my personal favorite, "My Country Tis of Thee..."
As for Buddhist poets and national anthems, well, Leonard Cohen did a pretty good job with "Democracy." A Canadian, son/grandson of Jewish cantors and a Buddhist practitioner wrote that moving, stirring song as well as poetry. I always urge folks to look him up on YouTube to see/hear various versions of that song which has more and more relevance with each passing day.
For now:
My country, 'tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing:
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims' pride,
from every mountainside
let freedom ring!
My native country, thee,
land of the noble free,
thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
thy woods and templed hills;
my heart with rapture thrills
like that above.
No more shall tyrants here
With haughty steps appear,
And soldier bands;
No more shall tyrants tread
Above the patriot dead—
No more our blood be shed
By alien hands.
Let music swell the breeze,
and ring from all the trees
sweet freedom's song:
let mortal tongues awake,
let all that breathe partake;
let rocks their silence break,
the sound prolong.
Our fathers’ God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing;
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our king.
Garrison, I sang it as instructed. An interesting exercise before coffee. I don't think it's the "rockets' red glare" so much that keeps people from singing the anthem, but the difficulty in the music. That high note is offputing to non-singers which most people are. I do agree, however, that we need an anthem that isn't about war. I personally favor "America the Beautiful" but no one listens to me.
I will say that your line "O say, don’t you love this land you must save," will be interpreted very differently by those of us on the left and those on the right. We interpret it as the need to save the planet and our democracy. They will think we need saving from "wokeness", immigrants and transgender people. Of course, we are right and the right is wrong.