| Fellow baseball enthusiasts will have noted that, in the wake of
the attack on the World Trade Center, they’ve taken to having
"God Bless America" sung during the seventh-inning stretch
at games. We here at Last Plane to Jakarta are not going to
go too deeply into the subject of the patriotic urge; while we share
with many of our peers a natural distaste for the sort of schlock
that that asserts itself every time a country finds itself engaged
in hostilities (any country, mind you; so very many national anthems
set bad poetry to plodding rah-rah musical backdrops; "God Bless
America" is not especially awful, and it must be said that "the
oceans, white with foam" is at least a nice phrase, if not a
toweringly original one), we also understand the genuine human need
for a sense of unity in threatening times. There are worse things
than a large crowd of people taking a moment to try to share the same
feeling, even if the feeling in question may tend toward the maudlin. |