"OUR NATIONAL ANTHEM

     "The Star-Spangled Banner" is not really a very good anthem.  Not only is is too hard for
most people to sing--the range is to great--but it's a war song.  And we have had more than
enough wars. And more than enough boasting, too:  "the land of the free, and the home of
the brave."  Don't forget slavery, and what we did--and are still doing--to Native American's.
We have not only slavery in our past; we have genocide.

     "God Bless America" is not much better, though it is shorter.  We sure don't want "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," or "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (borrowed from the unmusical English).

     How about "America the Beautiful"?  The first verse will remind us of how beautiful this
continent we occupy once was.  And what it asks--of God--is that he "crown our good / with brotherhood."  In such a murderous country as ours is, we could use more "brotherhood"--and "sisterhood."

     The second verse is even better--if you forget the racism of "pilgrims' feet"  which marked a "thoroughfare for freedom" across what our white ancestors saw as "wilderness" but the Native Americans knew as "home."  Of course "freedom"---the same word as "friendship," historically
--would not have let us massacre Native Americans along that thoroughfare.  But the last lines
of the second stanza of "America the Beautiful" are very, very good--and we need them:

                                America! America!
                                Amend thine every flaw!
                                     Confirm thy soul
                                     In self-control,
                                Thy liberty in law!

       That would be a wonderful anthem.  Even a prayer--a prayer I would be very happy to pray, fervently.
                               


                 

New Books!

Dear friends,

I do have lots of things to say--and a bunch of new essays that I need to post.  But I have been busy
with two new books, just out.

           ANEMONES MY FOOTSTOOL:  ESSAYS LITERARY,
               SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND POLEMICAL

                                               and 

                              OH, TO BE A 'CELLO!

The first book contains ten essays, mostly literary--but then literature is usually social, and both concerned with and a part of culture, and it is sometimes--maybe often--polemical.

The second book contains thirteen essays, variously "about" music, and thirteen poems--by
Yeats, Masefield, Lewis Carroll, Donne, Tennyson, Hardy, Wordsworth, and Mrs. Leo Hunter.

They should be available through bookstores and internet bookstores like Amazon.

And beware:  there is another book of Dickens essays in the offing, to be called  In the World to be of It.

                                                                       Yours,

                                                                       Bert Hornback