It's the birthday of the United States, celebrated this year in the shadow of a flagrantly-corrupt Supreme Court decision that has bestowed impunity on criminal acts committed by a president--a ghastly and unthinkable development fundamentally in conflict with the national spirit and two hundred years of precedent in American intellectual output and jurisprudence.
One wonders, yet again, if this nation dedicated to the proposition of equality can long endure.
It's also the birthday of my oldest child, who comes of age, as a female, in the shadow of yet another corrupt and unbecoming reversal of precedent, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. One wonders what the future of bodily autonomy will be in this nation conceived in liberty and once dedicated to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
So on this painful note, I’m going to
link a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" befitting such a tortured occasion, in a melancholic harmonization from 1862. The composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, was a New Orleanean abolitionist who had freed his father's slaves and was horrified by the last big insurrection in the USA, the Civil War. For many years he was the preeminent American touring musician, in high demand as a concert pianist, noted also for his technical showpieces for the piano. He dedicated the parent fantasia of patriotic tunes from whence this excerpt comes to his friend George McClellan, then commander of the Federal armed forces, struggling with the enormity of what had to be done to confront the Confederate threat.
It seems like we once again stand on that awful precipice—uncertain, conflicted, unsure of ourselves, unsure of our leaders, but knowing something must be done. Amid the festivities this year, take a moment to listen to Gottschalk’s elegaic presentation of our anthem. It’s comforting to know we as a nation of Enlightenment and humanist values have prevailed in hard times before.