Santorum is on the rise (I apologize for any unpleasant mental imagies provoked by that sentence). In the Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado primaries, he won the anyone-but-Mitt vote (rumor has it that in Missouri, dogs voted in record numbers). A recent national poll placed the former Pennsylvania senator in the lead, with Romney second, and Gingrich third. And there's a tell-tale sign that Santorum has his eye on Gingrich's (and the Republican party's) hard core base: fundamentalist Christians.
In a speech last week in Plano, Texas, Santorum repeated his assertion that the Obama Administration is hostile to religion, and came up with this gem:
Some commentators have been scratching their heads over Santorum's references to the French Revolution, but any members of the Bourbon, Capet or Valois families currently living in the U.S. can relax. An online associate who had the misfortune of being raised in a fundamentalist church gave me some much-needed context by directing me to Revelation 20:4:
I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
When a speaker publicly invokes hostility to religion and decapitation, he's invoking a narrative of the end of the world believed by millions of Americans: after the saved are swept up into the Heaven, the Antichrist takes over the world and those who still worship Jesus (or at least refuse to worship the Antichrist) are executed. Now it's never been adequately explained to me why if the saved have been gathered up into Heaven there's anyone left on earth who still worships Jesus, but nobody has ever asked me to edit apocalyptic narratives for logic and consistency.
But the larger point: any fundamentalist Christian who believes that narrative and who heard Santorum's speech heard a presidential candidate imply that President Obama is the Antichrist, or at best paving the way for him. If you think this conclusion is a bit of a stretch, take a look at this clip from a film called The Image of the Beast. My recovering Christian friend was required to watch it as a teenager by his church youth group. I've read the film is still popular with evangelical churches. It's on sale as a DVD at a site called Christiancinema.com. In this clip, a Christian is decapitated with a guillotine.
WARNING: The film you are about to see has really bad production values. And even worse facial hair.
Oddly, at the same time that Santorum was invoking an American future where Christians are guillotined, he seemed to want to sound relatively sane to appeal to independents because he closed by saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that."
Don't ask me how you call your political opponent an evil overlord with supernatural powers foretold by Biblical prophecy and then expect to be able to back-pedal from that, but Santorum has never asked me to edit his speeches for logic and consistency.
Hat tip to David Harnden-Warwick for the background information.
The other night I was rummaging through my shelves looking for an Elgar CD. I couldn't find it, and being in the mood to listen to some Elgar I started searching YouTube for some performances. I found some clips of the last night of the proms from recent years (the proms are a series of summer concerts in London). I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that at a certain point during the performance of Pomp and Circumstance everyone starts singing "Land of Hope and Glory," a British patriotic song whose lyrics were written to the music of P & C. I found myself staring in disbelief as members of the audience started waving Union Jacks and singing "wider still and wider may thy bounds be set/God who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet." It's fifteen years since the handover of Hong Kong, the Scots could well be on the verge of declaring independence, and a London audience is singing a prayer for imperial expansion.
I kept thinking, "The Brits really need to update their patriotic songs." I also kept wondering what was up with the people in the audience waving Norwegian flags (29 seconds in). But nationalism is about sentiment not rationality. No one in that audience seriously wants the UK to re-take India. Nevertheless it did make me reflect on the sense of national exceptionalism reflected in the some of the other songs from the proms, such as "Rule Britannia" and "Jerusalem" (the latter a Blake poem inspired by the legend that Jesus visited Britain as a boy).
Of course an American is hardly one to point fingers at the people of another country for any cultural hint they think they're better than everyone else. Hell, in this country nobody hints any such thing: they shout it from the rooftops (or on Fox News). And yet that's strangely absent from most of our patriotic songs. Our national anthem is essentially a prayer for national survival. "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and "America the Beautiful" are songs that bespeak love of a physical place ("I love thy rocks and rills/Thy woods and templed hills"). If I actually had to choose a new anthem (not that anyone's ever going to ask me) I might opt for "Shenandoah" (O Shenandoah, I long to hear you/Away you rolling river...Away, I'm bound away, 'cross the wide Missouri"). It refers to a specific, albeit prolonged historical event (the settling of the West by Americans of European descent) but it reflects the immigrant's sense of loss, the reality that to go somewhere new, however much promise it holds, you have to give up something. It's not a peculiarly American experience—but it's certainly part of who we are as a nation.
Doing some cursory research for this blog post I did discover some fascinating gems of American patriotic song. I had never heard "Hail Columbia" before. Composed in 1789, it has a delightfully eighteenth century sound:
But my possible favorite among my discoveries when I googled "American Patriotic Songs" is "Stalin Isn't Stallin'" a song written to drum up solidarity with one of Our Gallant Allies during World War II:
I'm sure the songwriter was blacklisted in the fifties. Songs such as "Stalin," "Hail Columbia" and "Shenandoah" should be better known to us—provided we could think about them in some historical context.
