Take a Sad Song and Make it Better:Messing Around with National Anthems

The US has a horrible national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner.” It’s unsingable (an octave and a half) and militaristic (“bombs bursting in air.”)  And because it is sung before every baseball game, most us think the last line is “”O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Play ball!”  We sometimes call it “The Star Spangled Banana.”

So I was surprised how much I enjoyed the awards ceremonies at the Olympics, and especially the moment when the anthem of the gold medalist’s nation was played.  Maybe because I liked hearing all those OTHER national tunes at a sporting event.  And  because the presence of these inspiring and happy athletes somehow ennobled those often sappy or militaristic melodies. 

Why do we hear national anthems at sporting events and nowhere else?  Are these our only chances publicly to praise our nation?  And is there something inherently patriotic about sporting events  - I thought they were just good fun and big business.

Irving BerlinIt’s been a long tradition at baseball games to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” during the seventh inning stretch, a happy song about peanuts and rooting for the home team.  But ever since 9/11 it has become de rigeur instead to sing “God Bless America,” Irving Berlin’s paean to God’s apparent affection for “my home sweet home.”  It’s a bit more singable, but just as jingoistic and self satisfied as the national anthem.  So now we have to hear TWO bad nationalistic songs every ball game. 

Many have said we need a different national anthem.  Two favorites, both very singable and sweet, are “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” and “This Land is Your Land.” Both celebrate America’s beauty (redwood forest, sea to shining sea.)  And both, in later verses, are surprisingly political and critical of our nation.

Woody GuthrieWe’d expect “This Land” to be radical in outlook; it was written by activist Woody Guthrie, whose 100^th birthday is being celebrated this month.  Indeed he is said to have written it in response and critique of  “God Bless America” which he said was unrealistic and complacent. Its last two verses (rarely sung) are:

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And the sign said - no tresspassin'
But on the other side...it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In the squares of the city -
In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

“O Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” written 50 years earlier by a Wellesley College professor after a western trip, includes a verse criticizing the selfish robber barons of her day:

O beautiful for heroes prov'd
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country lov'd,
And mercy more than life.

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine.

Ray CharlesBut that verse is hardly ever sung either. Except by Ray Charles.

Charles, and several other American artist of color have taken this dreary, nationalistic, exclusive songs, these sad songs, and made them better. How? By singing those more honest political verses. By singing them in iconic places. By jazzing them up and making them funkier.

Ray Charles’ version of “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies” is our most popular version, and amazingly when he sang it he BEGAN with this very third verse about American greed and selfishness, rather than the safe “amber waves of grain” of the first verse.  Even more amazingly, Charles was often invited to sing it at public religious events like the Superbowl and famously at the baseball World Series right after after 9/11, third verse first.  While many Americans seem to believe that a rich person is a better person, and would be a good president (viz. Romney backers), this verse says; don’t call these robber barons “heroes.”

Marian AndersonIn 1939, when The Daughters of the American Revolution barred African American singer Marian Anderson, because of her race, from sing at their Constitutional Hall, she opened her public concert on the steps of of the Lincoln Memorial with "My Country 'Tis of Thee," another patriotic favorite. She made it her song, and better.

Jose FelicianoAnd Jose Feliciano, great Puerto Rican guitarist, shocked and angered Detroit baseball fans in 1968 for being the first musician to perform the national anthem in a different style, a funky Latin beat. He took that sad song and made it funkier. People called him a traitor and radio stations refused to play his music for several years. But the doors were opened for new interpretations. Who can forget Jimi Hendrix's version at Woodstock? Now that's a better song!

James Welden JohnsonBut my favorite candidate for a better national anthem is the “Negro National Anthem.”  Written by African American poet James Welden Johnson, it was first performed in 1900 at a Lincoln’s birthday celebration by 500 fifth grade school children at an assembly in honor of guest Booker T. Washington.  (How cool would it have been to witness that?)

I first learned this song, not at a ball game, but in church.  It’s in many hymnals.  In a large interracial gathering it is especially wonderful to sing; African Americans know it by heart and sing it really fast.  Here’s a moving version of it sung by the choir of Grace Baptist Church, Washington DC at one of the inaugural balls after Obama’s swearing in.

But would its words speak for all Americans? You decide:

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heav'n ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith
that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope
that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed.
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered;
We have come treading a path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out of the gloomy past till now we stand at last,
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

 God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way.
Thou who has by thy might led us into the light,
Keep us forever on the path we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places oh God where we met thee;
Lest our heart, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand
True to our God, true to our native land.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Liars and Cheats

I’m getting worn down from being lied to so much.

From Democratic Underground*Mitt Romney lies so often that there are websites devoted to his lies, like http://romneytheliar.blogspot.com/.  He lies about his past record (eg on gay rights, coal, health care).  He lies about what Obama has said and done (Romney’s campaign ads are often given “Four Pinnochios” by fact check agencies).  He often says Obama went on an “apology tour” overseas.  He lies about the date when he left his lucrative and destructive job at Bain Capital.  He lies about his taxes and overseas tax shelters.  He lies about what he did to “save” the Olympics (lobby for a huge government bailout of the kind he opposed for his home state’s auto industry).  He even lied about his first name (at a debate each candidate was asked to give his first and last name; Mitt said “Mitt Romney.”  It’s Willard Mitt Romney.)  The list goes on…..

Those are the outright lies.  Then there is the obstruction of truth; as he leaves a job he regularly orders all files and records destroyed; Governor of Massachusetts, Salt Lake City Olympics “rescue”, Bain Capital, all records gone, so that it takes a bit longer and more hunting to detect the lie.  He has refused to make public his tax records, as is customary for national candidates; when his father ran for President he made public 12 years of taxes.

Then there are the “look snidely at the camera and rewrite history” lies; he wrote a NY Times Op-Ed piece against the auto industry bailout, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Then when the bailout turned the auto industry around and made it profitable and they paid back the loan early, with interest, Romney said to the camera, “I take credit for that.”

From Chevy Chase**I can chalk all these lies up to American politics.  Obama has stretched the truth a few times in political ads as well.  Spin, they call it in Washington, truthiness.  Just part of the game.  There is now a whole cottage industry of groups and websites that fact check political ads and speeches and lobbyists, with ratings graded from “One Pinnochio” to “Pants of Fire.”

But hearing all these lies day after day is turning me into a very cynical citizen, and a reluctant voter.  What difference does it make?  I do still vote.  I do still hopefully hold up that half full glass.  But I am lonelier and lonelier in my reluctant optimism; the percentage of eligible voters who actually go to the polls drops each election.

And I am appalled at my fellow citizens who buy this crap; if Fox says it, it must be true.  And those blind ignoramuses actually do vote.  Jefferson said a democracy can only survive with an educated electorate.  Our survival is in doubt.

Then this week the public lying got even worse, took an even deeper toll on my tortured optimism. Not in politics, but that other favorite American pastime, baseball.   My favorite baseball player, Melky Cabrero of the San Francisco Giants admitted that he used performance enhancing drugs.  He was suspended for the rest of the season.  This wasn’t just a great player and cute guy who inspired all kind of “milk” related puns in t-shirts (Got Melk?) and fan costumes (old fashioned milkman suits and caps.)  He was also voted Most Valuable Player of the All Star Game this summer, won that game with amazing hits and home runs; that win gave home field advantage for his National League in the World Series.  Melky’s juiced up state affected the future and record of the whole league.

From SFGate***Melky is a liar.  He signed a contract to play clean and then he cheated.  He lied to me and to Giants fans and to Major League Baseball.   He especially lied to kids who are told that honesty is the best policy and that crime doesn’t pay.  Crime did pay for Melky; his batting average and fame and salary went up and up.  It paid well.  Until it didn’t.  A common theory is that juicing up is widespread among players, but they mask it with markers that make for a clean test; Melky, they say, was just careless.   Whatever; kids saw his success and now they know that these drugs really do enhance performance.  How far will they go to break into the majors?

Romney’s lies make me cynical and angry and tired.  I just turn the radio off now as soon as he comes on.   Cabrero’s lies make me outraged and then sad, for him, for the team, for the game.  These days I spend more time following baseball than I do following politics.  I’m stuck in bed recovering from surgery.  Rooting for a winning team (til they lost Melky) passes the time and I think it aids in my healing – good vibes make for good muscles.  Romney and politics seem bad for my health; I get depressed and cynical and don’t do my exercises.

Is politics so much about winning (as opposed to making a society better) that it has become a game, like baseball? Are both our great American pastimes, politics and baseball, rotten to the core?

I remember taking an ethics course in seminary and reading a book by Sissela Bok called Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life.  It contrasted “teleological ethics” (ends justify means; white lies aren’t so bad) and “deontological, Kantian” ethics (lying is wrong, so don’t do it) and the then newish “character ethics” (what matters is not so much is an action moral, but is a person virtuous, what makes an ethical character?)  Romney and Cabrera both think the end justifies the means.  What people will do to win includes all kinds of dirty tricks.  Just ask that other great presidential liar, Nixon.

Maybe I have come to expect that lying is a part of the essential character of any politician; there is no such thing as a virtuous politician. And I guess I had naively forgotten about the siren song of power and money and prestige in baseball as well – Melky’s salary was already a lot higher than the president’s.  (If you don’t count off- shore tax shelters.)

“Fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way!”  That’s the boldly proclaimed mission of Superman, our iconic American comic book superhero.

The American Way seems increasingly to be about untruth and injustice.  Let the poor and the honest suffer.  Let the rich and the mendacious triumph.  Mitt and Melky – the American All Star team of liars.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

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* Democractic Underground

** Chevy Chase

*** SFGate

Two Faces of America: Stranger or Traveler

Our two poster boys – Barack and Mitt.  Two faces of our nation.

Obama: Multicultural, metrosexual, urban, Hawaii, California and Asia.  Basketball.  Community organizer.  Single mom.  Two daughters.  Comfortable with gay culture.   Paid off his student loans only eight years ago.  Progressive Christian.  Does pretty good Al Green cover.

Romney: White, owns homes in three states, overseas experience as Morman missionary to the French, recent advice tour to countries about Olympics, Jewish culture.  Horse dressage.  Polygamous great-grandparents.  Five sons.  Homophobic.  Never had student loans. Mormon bishop.  Sings “Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies” off key at campaign events.

Both: Private high school, Harvard grad school, family guys, a little restrained, faith important to them, both much richer than average American.  Both are northerners; almost all our presidents and candidates in recent memory have been southerners.

In my convalescence from total hip replacement surgery I am reading American novels.  Two great ones: Run, by Ann Patchett, and Old School by Tobias Woolf.  Simply put, the Obama novel and the Romney novel. 

Run is about an contemporary interracial family in Boston, “family” very broadly defined, thrown together in disaster, messy and loving and forgiving.  Old School is about 60’s New England boys’ private prep school, honor and plagiarism, privilege and tradition. (Also very funny and moving appearances by Robert Frost and Ayn Rand.)

Run and Obama embrace difference, and look to the future.

Old School and Romney control power, and cling to the past.

Both novels are primarily male.  Just like the whole presidential and legislative cast of characters in the novel known as America.  Where are the women?  Actually both novels have one fascinating woman character.  In Old School it’s a brief encounter with a no nonsense young woman who totally rejects tradition.  In Run it’s the surprising appearance of an unknown sibling, a young girl that reminded me of Gabby Douglas, the US gymnast phenom, nicknamed the Flying Squirrel.  This girl “runs” into the all male family and transforms them.  In both books the women, mercifully free from being stereotypical novelistic mothers or love interests, represent a new way, the future.

So my two thoughts about Obama and Romney, inspired by my random convalescence reading.  The cast of characters in a person’s life, and the plot line.

Obama is surrounded by strong women; his single mother, live-in mother-in-law, wife and daughters.  He is not threatened by how they “run” in very unorthodox ways into the future.  He knows in this country we need to learn to live “with,” to be in unusual families, to care for one another.

Romney had a strong businessman/politician father, a big-boy male business career, five sons, very patriarchal religion.  He’s about maintaining control, tradition, secrets, getting his way.  Because I said so.

And second thought, the plot of their lives.  William Faulkner said that all novels have one of only two possible plot lines: a person sets out on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. 

Both of my novels and both candidates embody being strangers.

Run is about the stranger girl coming to town, to the family.  Old School is about a stranger also, narrated by a scholarship kid from the Northwest who pretends to be rich old school and at the same time loathes that culture.  He is so strange he gets kicked out, and in a sense is then freed of that old tradition. 

(I went to a similarly restrictive all-girls New England boarding school a decade later than Old School, just when that whole system was crumbling.  Within a year of my graduation the school was coed, no longer church affiliated, open to the future.  The times, they are a changin’.  But 40 years later, the strongest indicator of wealth and success in the US is still parents’ wealth and education – that 1%.  Both Obama and Romney had that educational hand up, their children also.  It’s been a long time since we had a president like Andrew Jackson, frontier man without much education.)

So it seems to me that both Obama and Romney are strangers come to town; neither seems like “the average” American, whatever that is.  Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter intentionally cast their stories as men on a journey.  Maybe this analogy only applies to Democrats – I can’t for the life of me figure out the plot of Reagan or the Bushes; they are neither strangers, nor travelers. Maybe I can’t get over my sense that not just Reagan, but the Bushes always seemed to be acting, playing a role. Clinton’s big asset was how warm he was; everyone said he could “feel your pain.”  Obama gets raked by the liberal press for being aloof, mostly, I think, in comparison to slobbery Bill.

I prefer a smart aloof stranger surrounded by strong women any day over Mitt Macho Mystery Man.  Maybe American voters are also readers and thinkers – we can only hope…..

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Sarcastic and Hopeful

Now that I am a big time international columnist I find myself reading other columnists with more care, and with questions like:

-What good ideas can I steal from them?
-How do they do this every day or several times a week?
-Which ones would I recommend or want to emulate? -Which ones have influenced me over the  years?
-Oh yes, you readers – who are your favorite columnists? Could we list those, link to them?

Although I read some blogs, I am still a loyal newspaper reader, albeit sometimes on line. I read daily a national paper (New York Times) and a regional (San Francisco Chronicle).

Every morning I read the New York Times on line. (Sunday I also buy the paper so I can luxuriate in it all week and do the puzzles.) The Times has some great columnists; I like Paul Krugman (Nobel economist), Nicholas Kristof (globalization), Maureen Dowd (snarky and funny on people and Catholic Church), and Timothy Egan (the American West.)

I especially like Gail Collins, good progressive smart woman. Each week she and David Brooks, smarmy neo-conservative columnist (whom I usually read, but did not include in my above list of favorites) have a fairly friendly “conversation.” Excerpts from this week:

David: Not a lot of people are following politics closely this year. Four years ago, pollsters asked Americans if they found the presidential race interesting. A clear plurality said yes. This year, a clear plurality says no. Somehow they find a race between two androids less than scintillating.

Gail: Well, duh. You have the dramatic change-guy who didn’t seem to change anything – although I personally would argue that health care alone was huge. And on the other side, the incredibly boring businessman who has offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands to avoid the taxes most of the rest of the country has to pay.

David: We may be entering an era in which politics is less central. A lot has happened recently — jobs numbers, a health care law upheld, new immigration policies, zillions of dollars in ad spending. And the polls have hardly moved. Obama had a tiny lead four months ago and he has a tiny lead now. Nobody’s mind is being changed because nobody who is persuadable is paying attention. It’s apathy city.

Gail: David, don’t feel bad. I’m happy to tell you it’s the Republicans’ fault. The normal rule of democracy is that if things are lousy, you throw out the incumbents. But right now the opposition is controlled by people who are totally insane and good at nothing but shutting things down. I would argue that the president, with a Congress composed mainly of Democrats and traditional Republicans, could take care of a lot of our problems. But if people simply want a change, all they’ve got is the Forces of Loony Doom.

…..David: (after chiding Gail for being too much of a starry-eyed liberal) Anyway, the topic at hand is apathy. Granted, I studiously ignore stories about fund-raising numbers. I have never seen compelling evidence that fund-raising levels powerfully influenced a presidential race. Whether Romney outraises Obama or vice versa is totally unimportant.

…….Gail: But I can see how this particular campaign is turning a lot of people off. And now that I think of it, I might have been too quick in giving up on the issue of the “super PACs” and their endless money. Folks in the true-blue or really-red states feel as if their votes don’t matter, and they’re sort of right – it’s as if they’ve already been counted. And people in the swing states are under such a barrage of attack ads from both sides, they’re numb with disdain for everybody involved. I have family visiting from Ohio right now, and they’re like refugees from a TV-ad tsunami. And it’s only July! There’s got to be a better way.

The S.F. Chronicle, like many papers, is shrinking before our very eyes, but we keep buying it for sports, funnies, and columnists. Jon Carroll, my favorite, sometimes reflects on news, but also has favorite topics like cyberspace, local theater, hiking at Pt. Reyes, and cats. He had a recent column about Oakland, where he lives, and the Mayor’s attempts to control gang violence. He began and ended the column in this typical fashion:

Just to be clear, I never took Jean Quan's "100 Blocks o' Crime" thing seriously. Real social problems don't work that way, with easy-to-remember numbers and easy-to-understand fixes. Besides, it did not seem particularly evidence-based.

But then, politicians are forever doing dumb stuff because they think they can get votes. I took the whole 100-blocks thing to mean that Oakland was going to increase police presence in high-crime areas. That would be good for the residents of those areas, so I was vaguely for it - just as the thing itself was a vague promise to help out.

Nobody sentient would think it was a real program; it was just the name of a marginal policy shift. The gangs were not going to go away, and the poverty that spurred on individual criminal entrepreneurs was not going to be alleviated any time soon. I understood - I think everybody understood - that any change in Oakland was going to take time and commitment.

……..

It's a sad situation, and it leaves the city floundering, looking for answers and getting just finger-pointing. Could everyone please stop petty politicking and try to work together on this thing? The voters would be ever so grateful.

In other news: Now that Larry Ellison [local billionaire owner of Oracle] has bought 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, I was wondering whether he might help his home state of California by buying it, too. I know there must be legal roadblocks to such a purchase, but with all that money involved, there must be a way.

See, this will be the real test for people who say that market forces are the way out of our current dilemma. What's more market-y than a private venture capitalist buying a huge entity and turning it around? Plus, Ellison has the cash reserves that California doesn't.

There would be many tax breaks and perks for such a purchase. California has many state parks languishing because of fiscal problems. I say we give him one of them to build a house on, in exchange for which he raises the salaries of public employees. Heck, Larry, take two. All we want is solvency.

Or, if that's too ambitious, he could buy Oakland.

The fact that I chose these two examples suggests I like columnists who write smart mildly sarcastic mockings of the rich and powerful and who root hopefully for people trying to make things better. That could describe Ed Kilgore’s column on US politics that we link to here as well.

Your mildly sarcastic, hopefully rooting columnist is taking a few weeks off for some surgery. I’ll be back with a new hip sometime in August.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Old Man River

If the United States were a rectangular biscuit, and you wanted to share half with a friend, you could hold it in your two hands and break it in half, west and east, simply along the dividing line of the Mississippi River.  IE, the U.S. (lower 48 states at least,) is split roughly in half by the north-south line of Old Man River, the 4^th longest river in the world.

[1] From Washington State Command Center(Indeed sometimes when I can’t get to sleep, I picture in my head the US and try to name all 50 states, starting with northeast: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont…. I know there are 26 states east of the Mississippi and 24 west of the river.  I’m usually asleep by Arkansas.)

I quoted Langston Hughes a few weeks ago in this column, on the Dream Deferred.  He wrote a great poem about rivers, which begins:

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve know rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human
     blood in human veins.

 My soul has grown deep like the rivers…

It’s hard to think about the Mississippi River without hearing the deep voice of another black man, Paul Robeson, singing “Old Man River:” “…I’m tired of living, and scared of dying, but Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along.”

Black dockworker Joe sings this song in the great American musical Showboat, an amazingly honest look (for its time – 1927) at race relations, on a Mississippi River paddlewheel show boat. (Think “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine,” “Make Believe.”) The Mississippi ends its 2500-mile journey from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico in the deep South, so it’s not surprising that it appears in many stories of black and white America.  Just think of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn (1884), who meets the escaped slave Jim on an island in the river, defies convention by traveling with him, hiding him, and ultimately aiding in his freedom, all along the river, which is practically a character in the novel itself.  This river understands the slave’s life: “Tote that barge, lift that bale, get a little drunk and you land in jail.  I gets weary and sick of trying, I’m tired of living…..”  The river knows, and just keeps rolling along.

[2] From National Geographic SocietyThe Mississippi is at the heart of America, not only geographically, but historically.  Its wide course formed a boundary line of New Spain and New France and now serves as the boundary for eight states.  Control of the river turned the course of the Civil War.  Like the blood flowing in the veins of Hughes’ poems, the river and its major tributaries the Ohio, the Illinois, the Tennessee, floated settlers west and south from Pennsylvania to the frontier. Explorers Lewis and Clark began their epic 1804, 3700 mile journey to the Pacific at the St. Louis junction of the Mississippi and the Missouri and traveled by water for much of the trip.

Not only people traveled the river and its tributaries, but goods also.  In fifth grade US History I made a box project of an Ohio River barge, tying together little stick logs that floated in a metal box with real water, carrying a family, dog, trunks, bags of grain, plough, and spinning wheel.  So much the more today is the Mississippi a major commerce artery.  500 million tons of corn, wheat, coal, petroleum products, sand and gravel, salt, sulphur, chemicals and building materials travel by barge each year to New Orleans and other delta ports, generating $13 billion in spending.  The river is crucial to our economy, busy night and day.

I visited friends in Minneapolis St. Paul a few years ago, the most northern of the large cities founded and formed by this massive river.  We picnicked on its banks and visited the northernmost of its 43 dams and locks, at St. Anthony Falls.  There the locks take the water from 800 to 750 feet above sea level, the sharpest drop of all the locks.  We watched a massive barge carrying grain move slowly into the lock, gates closed, water drained, and lowered down, it continued its journey to the sea.  Next came a tiny canoe with two women, a child and a dog.  It followed the exact same procedure; rang the bell for the lockmaster, floated in to the lock, gates closed and opened, and down it went. 

The rich silt of the Mississippi river forms one of the most fertile farming areas of the nation; hence all that corn and wheat on the barges.  Tragically the nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers used on those crops take part in the southern journey also.  Off the delta in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest ocean dead zones in the world, hypoxic (low-oxygen) areas caused by those runoff chemicals, stunting or killing all marine life.  The dead zone created by the Mississippi phosphates is larger than the state of Connecticut.  Cooperative attempts to fix the problem are small and slow between the 31 states in its watershed, the federal government, big agriculture business interests and NOAA, the ocean department that seeks to preserve ocean and gulf health. 

And the river carries another deadly product, its own water.  Though the Army Corps of Engineers attempts to keep a shipping channel open and safe with dams and locks and levees and spillways and backchannels, the river’s history includes dramatic floods, destruction, death.  The hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Rita, wiped out New Orleans levees, killed over 1500 people, and flooded 80% of the city of New Orleans, which has yet to recover.

[3] From Les Femmes - The TruthThese last two destructive parts of the river’s story, dead zones and flood, are human induced.  The river just keeps rolling along, but we put deadly chemicals in it, we try to force it to go and not to go certain places against its power and might, and we create climate conditions that increase hurricanes and rainfall.

Or don’t.  This month parts of the river are at their lowest levels in years; last year the river at Baton Rouge was at 28 feet in July; today it is at 4.  No worry, says the Army Corps of Engineers, we keep dredging the deep-water channels.  But low snow packs from a warmer winter and widespread drought will make the river go down more before summer’s end.  I detect a human hand in this climate problem also.

70 million Americans live within the Mississippi watershed.  18 million get their water from it.  All of us consume the corn products (corn syrup, ethanol), grain and chemicals on those barges.  And I’ve said nothing about the river’s 127 different species of fish or over 300 species of birds that call it home.  None of us can live without rivers and this river.

But it’s been a long time since two boys, black and white, could float down the river free and  alone, toward freedom.  As Huck says, “There warn’t no home like a raft, after all.  Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t.  You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”

And on a river, we hope.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

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[1] Washington State Command Center

[2] National Geographic Society

[3] Les Femmes - The Truth