Praise The Lord & Pass The Ammunition

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:40 PM -0500 12/13/05, James Landau wrote:
>How good is the song "Roger Young"?  I'm not enough of a musician to want
>to judge it, but I will note it is not a rousing song but more of a dirge.
>The words basically repeat a single metaphor
>      "In the everlasting annals of the infantry/ shines the name of Roger
>Young"
>
>A couple of ADS-L members have said they don't like "God Bless America"
>that much.  I am curious whether they dislike the music, the words, the
>sentiments, or the contexts in which it is encountered.
>
>My pet peeve among US patriotic songs is "It's A Grand Old Flag" which (in
>my humble opinion) has a great melody and words that are simply
>embarrassing to listen to.  While on the subject:
>"This land is your land" - a very nice song, but not a rouser and therefore
>never a competitor to "God Bless America"
>"My Country 'tis of Thee"- let's give it back to the British
>"Star Spangled Banner" - great words (if you can still distingusih them
>after ten million repetitions) married to the wrong tune.  It is, as far as
>I know, the ONLY national anthem actually written on a battlefield by an
>eyewitness.

You don't include an evaluation of "America the Beautiful", which
I've always liked better than most of its competitors, although the
first two lines always puzzled me as a child ("O beautiful for
spacious skies/For amber waves of gray")--we didn't know from "grain"
in NYC.

>On TV last week I heard someone refer to Michigan as "the big mitten."  An
>obvious nickname, but my wife, who is a native of Detroit and still points
>to her hand when asked where she is from, never heard it before.
>
"The Mitten" is relatively common, especially in the northern part of
the state and in particular the U.P. (Upper Peninsula), which is
crucially *not* part of the mitten (check the map), so it's not quite
accurate to gloss The Mitten as 'Michigan'; it's just the Lower
Peninsula.  The quite funny songs of The Yoopers, for example,
feature numerous (universally disparaging) references to The Mitten,
as do books set in the U.P.

Larry