O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Most enduring image and most popularly sang phrase in America is the ending to the American National anthem. Penned by Francis Key Scott while local forces in Fort MacHenry in Maryland guarding the Baltimore Harbor were being bombarded by the British Navy in 1814, the song would later be appropriated by the U.S. Congress in 1931 to become the national anthem.

The song itself was in fact from a popular English pub-drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Anacreon, the “convivial bard of Greece,” was patron saint to a society dedicated to “wit, harmony, and the god of wine.” The sinuous Venus and rambunctious Bacchus were prominent exemplars for the group. (I mention this to counterbalance the finical eastern seaboard sensibility that tends to relegate historical accuracy to the backseat when polishing the newest antiseptic myth on our national heritage.)

Young Alex Mercado at SVES just got his U.S. passport. He is one of the so-called “stateless” children whose civil status was of great controversy not too long ago. He admitted during one of our school assemblies that for the first time, he could sing the national anthem in a manner that made his hair stand on end and his heartbeat drum faster.

President Bush’s recent speech on the War in Iraq called on the nation’s patriotism to remain firm and committed to what may be a long haul in establishing democracy and freedom in the land between the two rivers.

In the ‘50s, Max Lerner asked, “What makes America more than simply the congeries of individual will and appetites but a civilization?” His learned answer was a tomé titled America as a Civilization. A tour de force in social analysis, he provided two holding images of American Civilization.

The first is that of the craftsman. The American did not spend time figuring and lamenting what s/he could not do. The American credo focused on what it can do. “If in doubt, do something,” has been the American ‘can do’ stance. America discovered that technology is power. America brought the world’s imagination outside of this global sphere into the vast regions of the open blue, to the moon and back, and in the process, allowed homo sapien americus to embark in both an extensive external and intensive internal journey.

The second image comes from the environment. America is a vast country. There is always land available at the next river bend. At one time, its west coast extended to Manila Bay! The vast environment is there to be explored and exploited. The margin of waste had been wide and enormous, but the sense that there remains an open space just ahead, or that history is never closed but remains an open book, with a radical indeterminable future waiting to be created, gives continual freshness to the American vision.

Emma Lazarus’ famous poem enshrined in Statue of Liberty has this portion: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore; send these, the homeless, tempest-toast to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” America is a haven.

Lerner began his book with a series of American images. He would conclude that there is no one symbol that captures the essence of the civilization. America had the Civil War, and the Vietnam War to rend its soul. Every other conflict from the American Revolution to the Gulf War reads like an epic continuity of almost unbroken success. The soft underbelly of America had always been its reluctance to wage war. Even now, the discerning can see that the Iraqi War is proving to be catastrophic to the American pocketbook, overextended as it is with the fluffy social security net set in place three generations back. To the mindful, we are also conscience-stricken since war as an instrument of resolving foreign policy had not been the ‘American way.’ We had, in fact, imposed that policy on Japan when we guided the formation of their 1947 Constitution.

How looks the land of the free? Of course, in our FREE market economy, some are freer than others. Consider the statistics on wealth distribution. The top 1 percent of the population own 38.1 percent of the wealth in the country, the next 4 percent own 21.3 percent, and the next 5 percent own 11.5 percent. That is to say, the top 10 percent of the country owns 70.9 percent of the wealth of this nation! The remaining 90 percent own a mere 29.1 percent

Put another way. If there are 100 of us dividing $100, one person gets $38.10, four get $5.32 each, five get $2.30 each, 10 get $1.25 each, twenty get $0.60 each and the remaining twenty of us would get $0.23 each. Ever wander why the phrase in the national anthem ends in a question mark?

In the home of the brave, some are braver than others. Unfortunately, in terms of military service, it is those in the lower income bracket, usually from the non-Caucasian minority population, and the lower 13 percentile in the academic achievement scale that gets to sign up for duty. This is not to disparage the military. It is to point to a reality that often, bravery is the child of economic necessity!

“When in the course of human events . . .” the experiment began. The Native Americans earlier encountered both the openness of the Pilgrims and the moral treachery of the Puritans. Citizens have been driven by the adventures of faith, as well as the defensiveness of fear. Summer soldiers worry about differential pays and comfort zones. Sunshine patriots pass judgment in the shades of their cooled six-packs kept close by. The day after a political crisis, quarterbacking diplomats abound in talk shows. The wily human factor takes many forms.

In my social studies class, NMI history is introduced as a people joining an on-going 229-year experiment in social organization called the United States of America. The US of A is not a destination. It is a political creation still in progress. It had borrowed heavily from imperial Rome and democratic Greece, awe-filled Egypt and faith-encrusted Fertile Crescent. Now, it has invited the world, from the Asian steppes to the Congo, to come to its shores. In its bicentennial in 1976, the US of A talked about the new Earthrise civilization, and a new declaration of Global Interdependence.

America does not ask to be saved, nor does it seek to be served. The reverse is true. America is out to save. It seeks to serve. It seeks to construct an expanse of diverse social systems held within the frame of an open world society. This is brave work in the planet of the free. This is what keeps me being an American.