The Tris McCall Report

Lyrics Check: "God Bless America"

We went to Yankee Stadium a few weeks after the attacks. The Yanks, if you remember, were in the midst of an amazing resuscitation act that would take them to the ninth inning of the last game of the World Series, but that's another essay, that's not what I'm writing about today. It had become customary, during September, to suggest that singing "God Bless America" in a crowded stadium, joining voices with fifty thousand others, could be a meaningful and moving gesture. I did it, and was unmoved by it. But later, after the game was over, "New York, New York" played over the loudspeakers, and as the capacity crowd pushed its way through the promenade toward the exits, a grand chorus of voices, some drunken, most tired (for it had been a long game) enthusiastically pledged their desire to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep, and make a brand new start of it. This I found moving, unspeakably moving. And for weeks, that observation -- this preference -- was about all I had to say about the attacks. I believed it to be a personal observation, not all that dissimilar to other contrarian positions I hold, like arguing that Three's Company was aesthetically superior to The Deer Hunter. It took three months of solid reflection and a trip to New Orleans to understand my reaction, but now that I do, I think it's important enough to share, so bear with me here.

In the four months since the attacks, "God Bless America" has been adopted as an unofficial national anthem, sung alongside (and often in lieu of) "The Star-Spangled Banner" at major gatherings and events. I'm not sure why this happened, but I know now that this was wrongheaded, a terrible mistake, and it's one with serious consequences. Our nation's understanding of historical and cultural events is framed by the songs and stories we tell ourselves, and the frame we've chosen is a poor one. "God Bless America" reinforces terrible misperceptions about the nature of the attack. Moreover, it's an awful song.

Let's handle my latter objection first:

"God bless america/ land that I love/ stand beside her and guide her/ through the night with the light from above"

Besides the garbled syntax and the inane, childlike inner rhymes, there's not all that much to object to in the opening stanza. I hate it when songwriters refer to a nongendered entity, like a country or a ship, as "her" or "she", but i'll write it off as the sort of clumsy diction that patriotic poets feel they need to approximate. And I've got no real problem with the plea for divine guidance and extra-terrestrial influence; if it feels off point to you to respond to the material conditions of plane hijackings, international troop deployment, blood, fire, and dust with appeals to invisible superheroes from outer space, well, it does to me, too, but certainly there are more pernicious understandings tabled by talking heads every day on CNBC, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal. No, so far, "God Bless America" is the sort of forced verse you'd expect from a brown-nosing and vaguely precocious fifth-grader, entreating her presbyterian social studies teacher for extra credit points. The trouble -- and the misperception that trouble engenders -- starts in the second verse:

"From the mountains to the prairies/ to the oceans white with foam/ God bless America/ my home sweet home."

First, about that second line: "white with foam"? of all the possible combinations of assonance and rhyme offered by the English language, this is the best the songwriter can do? Was he on deadline? I challenge you to find a more awkward moment anywhere in the annals of patriotic verse. And then to ask the singer to ascend through the line, hold and extend that last ridiculous word on a high note -- well, it's stupid, stupid, stupid, and I am sure that the spectacle of fifty thousand earnest voices bellowing out "white with foam" as if it was somehow an inspiring or meaningful sentiment contributed to my sense that we were all participating in a charade, a display of sham unity. Because the New York City crowd surrounding me had no collective affection for mountains or prairies, or oceans of any color. They raised their voices in acknowledgement of a specific and terrible assault on two great cities on the eastern seaboard, selected for attack because of their concentration of wealth and power, but the song they were encouraged to sing deliberately obscured that specificity and that context.

There has been an unfortunate movement to nationalize these attacks, to report the story as an "attack on America", to draw insulting and historically irresponsible analogies to Pearl Harbor, and to pretend that the shadow of the pan-Islamic fundamentalist movement that wrecked Battery Park City falls equally "from sea to shining sea". The adoption of "God Bless America" has been part of that movement, part of the spirit of me-too-ism and false humility that caused the absurd evacuation of minor buildings in Memphis, and Columbus, Ohio, and Podunk, Alaska, and continues with unabated war-talk from quarters of the country that pretend to be fully mobilized and on alert, but are realistically under no threat whatsoever. Many of these new hawks make their homes in the mountains and the prairies, and from their redoubts there, preach a kind of sanctimonious front-line readiness with the moral authority of an active warrior. But no plane-bombs struck the mountains or the prairies, and nor does anybody but a certifiable paranoiac think they will -- not until every building from Fifty-Seventh Street to the Battery has been reduced to a pile of rubble. If it can truly be said that we're engaged in the kind of war that requires an office of homeland security, then Times Square is the very front line of that war. And I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that those who are actually there, on that front line, should be the ones who determine how that war ought to be fought, or whether it should be fought at all.

Of course that is not what has happened. We've heard plenty of tough talk from senator Richard Lugar from Indiana, Senator Hatch from Utah, Senator Shelby from Alabama, Tom Ridge of Erie, Pennsylvania, and President Bush and his coterie of Texas oilfield jet-setters. I've got nothing but respect for these statesmen (well, some of them, anyway, but I do use the word "statesmen" unironically), but they are plainly engaged in a propaganda shell game whereby they've attempted to convince us that it was the mountains, the prairies, the great American abstraction and Old Glory that was assaulted, and not the Twin Towers of Vesey and Chambers Street in downtown Manhattan. I certainly understand the reasoning behind their shell game, and I understand why it's crucial to the successful execution of their war effort. But if and when reprisals come, they will not strike Indiana, or Utah, or Alabama, or even the Texas oilfields. They will strike New York City -- and they will take the lives of more New Yorkers, they will destroy buildings and parks, neighborhoods and landmarks, on specific blocks in specific sections of the city we know and care about. I bet you can name the blocks. I bet you can name the buildings. I bet you can name some people you know who live or work on those blocks. Can Senator Shelby say the same? If access to the Lower East Side is cut off, will Richard Lugar care? Will Tom Ridge? How much of our home, our way of life, are we willing to sacrifice so the war leaders of the mountains and the prairies are able to satisfy their international aims and objectives?

My home, abstractly, is America, and that's something I don't forget -- it's a responsibility (and often a culpability) that I carry with me daily. But my "home sweet home" is not America -- it's on Palisade Avenue in Union City, New Jersey. And Palisade Avenue has its own set of issues and concerns, and those issues and concerns are not subsumed by those of the mountains and the prairies just because we're in a time of international crisis. Look, I am not preaching isolationism here. I'm trying to inject a needed dose of realism into this debate, clear away some of the cobwebs, so that we can acknowledge the specifically local dimensions of our current foreign policy dilemma. If Osama Bin Laden, or the next bogeyman who drags out of the far corners of Central Asia, or some pot-luck fundamentalist maniac who's had enough of depleted uranium falling on his hut actually does get his hands on enough hardware to build a nuclear device, it's not going to be detonated on the mountains or the prairies. It's earmarked for Forty-Second and Broadway, or Thirty-Fourth and Sixth. I want an acknowledgement of that, and I want our local leaders to step up and take charge of the argument, and the national direction, by right, because the consequences are ours, and will continue to be ours. And I don't mean Rudy Giuliani running around with a hardhat, enacting his most elaborate and arcane police-state fantasies. I mean someone from the city willing to say "hold up, while it might be true that 'America' as an abstraction was assaulted, 'New York City' has been assaulted, and continues to be a target both in the abstract and the concrete; this was not an attack on 'our freedoms' as a nation as much as it was an attempt to injure or destroy the engine of international trade and commerce, the seat of international culture and creativity." Because Al-Qaeda (and fundamentalists in general, I would argue) are not interested in war against El Paso -- their fight is with New York City and everything it stands for, everything articulated in the lyrics of "New York, New York".

I think I used to misunderstand the song. I heard it as a paean to competition, the ruthless drive to be "king of the hill, top of the list," the brightest color on the biggest canvas possible. But really it's about the desire for positive action, a celebration of the creative ambition that drew us all here. That ambition does not have to be destructive -- in fact, the Manhattan skyline stands as an active symbol of its power to create on a grand and historic scale. Resentful bastards around the world will always strike at the most obvious symbols of creativity and positive action, and New Yorkers have always taught themselves to be guarded against the hostile jealousies and willful misunderstanding of out-of-towners. Kabul is pretty far out of town, Kandahar farther still. We know what we're up against here -- nothing new, only an extreme version of what we've always been up against, that familiar and naked hostility to creativity, imagination and the proposition that when you've got a piece of open ground, or some open space, you fill it as big and as bold as you can. The crucial word in the lyric, i think, is "make": the perpetual American desire to make a brand new start, and the famous penultimate line which only sounds boastful until you travel a little, and recognize how unbearably true it is. This is the place to be, now and in perpetuity, and it is foolish to suggest that somehow the mountains and the prairies are equivalent in importance, and require an equivalent defense.

It's up to you,

Tris McCall

P.S.: in the past few months, I've noticed an alarming rise in the belligerence of local police officers and firemen. This, I suppose, is to be expected -- when you round up a bunch of big uniformed goons who are essentially frat boys with badges and guns, and tell them they are heroes, they're going to be inclined toward rowdiness and an even greater sense of entitlement than they ordinarily display. It's difficult to imagine the circumstances under which I'd understand policemen as heroes, and these are definitely not those circumstances. Policemen are supposed to help civilians who are fleeing from collapsing buildings; that's part of the job. That police officers in New York City actually did their jobs (for once) -- rather than spend the day harassing black kids on the streets or throwing people in jail for smoking marijuana -- was a matter of course rather than choice; if there's a massive attack on the city, and the black kids and the pot smokers in washington square park aren't forgotten for awhile, well, we're in worse shape than I even feared. And nor does twenty-four hours of rescue work erase years of injustice and a culture of violence, paranoia, inattention to neighborhood concerns, and general bureaucratic nastiness. New York City is filled with people who provide the very unpaid service of their presence and attention to the city, people who don't drive home to Scarsdale or Hauppauge after the day is over. I admire everybody who stayed here and dug in, didn't consider leaving, everybody who kept on rocking, kept on writing, kept on "making it here" straight through the crisis. The policemen and firemen aren't my heroes. You guys are my heroes.Ii'm proud of everything you did in 2001, and i'm proud to know you.

Stand beside me, and guide me through the night with the light from above.