{"id":426679,"date":"2010-03-14T12:30:22","date_gmt":"2010-03-14T16:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=72735"},"modified":"2010-03-14T12:30:22","modified_gmt":"2010-03-14T16:30:22","slug":"when-first-unto-this-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/426679","title":{"rendered":"When First Unto This Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>You could see it coming in the eyes of Walker Evans\u2019<\/a> Depression-era tenant farmer, Allie Mae Burroughs, and it\u2019ll make you cry, that razor\u2019s edge of a sad smile about her that says, \u201cYou, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could see it coming. Somewhere, a young boy in a dinosaur t-shirt holds his dying mother\u2019s hand and remembers that the distant voice on the phone, the Insurance Voice, said simply, \u201cNo.\u201d He could be forgiven for fearing he\u2019d spoken to someone he shouldn\u2019t have.<\/p>\n

You could see it coming. Wall Street banks are too big to fail, and the black-souled ghouls of hate radio and FoxNews tell us our neighbors\u2019 lives are too small to save<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Schoolbooks are being rewritten<\/a> to redeem Joseph McCarthy, make of Phyllis Schlafly something like an authoritarian madonna, and turn the Separations Clause into a guarantor of theocracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Andrew, Son of Schlafly, is rewriting the Bible<\/a>, too, no doubt replacing Amos with Milton Friedman and \u201cjustice like a mighty stream\u201d with trickle-down economics. Joseph saw seven years of famine in Pharaoh\u2019s dream. \u201cMerely the lower strings of a cats cradle in the Market\u2019s invisible hand,\u201d Schlafly\u2019s Joseph will say, adding with certainty, \u201cIt\u2019s the business cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joseph\u2019s coat of many colors is back in his father Jacob\u2019s mournful hands in the traditional American tune, \u201cWhen First Unto This Country.\u201d<\/a> It was an Austin group, The Gant Family, who brought the song to folklorists in the 1930s. Bob Dylan called it \u201cmy foreign language song, my only foreign language song.\u201d\u00a0 And I wonder what he means, because isn\u2019t Jacob\u2019s 11th son a little like us, post-Declaration America\u2019s 11th generation, give or take? In a dream our ancestors hold our bloodstained coat and say, \u201cWe warned you to be careful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an authentic American Joseph who sings \u201cWhen First Unto This Country.\u201d He wears his innocence like his \u201ccap set on so bold.\u201d He loses it, along with his coat of many colors. Still, we should remember that Joseph had enough sense to outsmart Pharaoh and to make sure his people got his bones out of Egypt.<\/p>\n

How fine it would be for the young man with the dying mother to sing this song to the Insurance Voice on the other end of the phone line. But that\u2019s the thing. He did, and if you don\u2019t believe me ask Walt Whitman, who heard it and knew the young man and all America learned it from the delicious singing of their mothers.<\/p>\n

Look again at Evans\u2019 Allie Mae. It\u2019s not condemnation in her eyes, it\u2019s defiance and a promise of solidarity. Sure enough, we brought rats with us when we came to this country, and those of us who would have made peace with the Natural and Free Human Beings already here soon found ourselves outnumbered. But not silenced.<\/p>\n

When we elected America\u2019s first African-American president in 2008, it seemed we\u2019d earned a song like Whitman\u2019s tribute to Lincoln: \u201cO Captain My Captain!<\/a> Our fearful trip is done.\u201d Ours was not a requiem, of course, but a christening, a raising of the sails. We cheered departure, not arrival. Democracy means we come new unto this country, every day.<\/p>\n

We saw it coming, of course. Those frightened of freedom and equality heard our singing and set about banging their pans. There\u2019s nothing new about this. Some see the open country and the untamed spirit that makes America what it is. But others see only a place to be conquered and a people to be subjugated.<\/p>\n

Why this song, now? To remind ourselves of the mighty stream of justice and hope that courses through the people\u2019s America. Tactical demands of the day require us to look down at our feet as we walk along a precipice. But when we raise our eyes to the horizon, we find that the singer of \u201cWhen First Unto This Country\u201d might just be ending the song where it began, on a new departure. We\u2019re always strangers in a land of possibility and danger, and maybe that\u2019s what Dylan meant when he called it a foreign-language song.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Dylan\u2019s apparition, caught among the voices of the crowd, the videoed soul of a nation singing our varied carols.<\/p>\n

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Tags: ” Walker Evans<\/a>, “When First Unto This Country<\/a>, Allie Mae Burroughs<\/a>, Andrew Schlafly<\/a>, Bob Dylan<\/a>, health care reform<\/a>, Jacob<\/a>, Joseph<\/a>, Pharaoh<\/a>, Phyllis Schlafly<\/a>, Texas State Board of Education<\/a><\/p>\n

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You could see it coming in the eyes of Walker Evans\u2019 Depression-era tenant farmer, Allie Mae Burroughs, and it\u2019ll make you cry, that razor\u2019s edge of a sad smile about her that says, \u201cYou, too.\u201d You could see it coming. Somewhere, a young boy in a dinosaur t-shirt holds his dying mother\u2019s hand and remembers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-426679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}