FROM THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP - A POEM
Sail on, O ship of state!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849)
FROM U.S.A – A TRILOGY OF NOVELS
“U.S.A is the slice of a continent. U.S.A is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”
John Dos Passos (1930)
FROM DEMOCRACY - A SONG
Sail on, sail on
O mighty ship of state!
To the shores of need
Past the reefs of greed
Through the squalls of hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on...
It's coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
And it's here they got the spiritual thirst
It's here the family's broken
And it's here it's here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
Leonard Cohen (1992)
THE AMERICA I GREW UP IN
Conservatives, and particularly Fox News bozos, used to complain that President Obama’s America was no longer the America they grew up in. Then or now, this is not the America in which I grew up either.
· In the America in which I grew up, in elementary school we recited the original version of the Pledge of Allegiance, without the words “under God”. But conservatives whine that religion has been taken out of the schools.
· When I was young, the Glass-Steagall Act prevented banks from buying and selling securities. Now just ten years after such buying and selling destroyed the American economy, conservatives whine about the much more lenient regulations of the Frank-Dodd Act.
· When I grew up the top marginal individual income tax rate was 91%. Now it has just gone down from 39.6% to 37% and conservatives would like to lower it further.
· In 1950 the minimum wage went up to $0.75, which is equivalent to $7.13 in 2012$. When I was young, from 1961 to 1981 the federal minimum wage was between $8 and $10, adjusted for inflation to 2012 dollars. Now it is $6.53 in 2012 dollars ($7.25 in current dollars), less than it was 69 years ago.
· Then the ratio of average CEO compensation to average worker pay was about 25/1. Now it is around 250/1, but conservatives complain about “union bosses”.
· In the America of my youth, the top 1% of households took in about 10% of the nation’s aggregate income. Now the figure is more than 20%, and Republicans whine about “class warfare” while studiously ignoring the fact that the Big Rich have won the “war” while everyone else has lost.
Gary Waldman
Revised March 2019
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
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