Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture

Notes

 1. Richard Cooper, “General Casts War in Religious Terms,” Los Angeles Times, October , . 2. Jay Rosen, “Public Journalism as a Democratic Art,” http://www.imdp.org/artman/publish/ article_.shtml (a revised version of a talk delivered at the Projects Seminar on public journalism of the American Press Institute, Reston, Virginia, November , ). 3. She made this remark on ’s The Today Show, January , . 4. Interview with George W. Bush by David Horowitz, Salon, May , , http://www.salon. com/news/feature////bush/index.html.   1. See also William Safire, “Homeland,” On Language, New York Times Magazine, January , , . 2. The significance of this event was considerable, because a scant two weeks earlier the British forces had taken Washington, D.C., and burnt down the entire Capitol, an attack of even greater extent and ferocity than that inflicted on the Pentagon on September , . The banner celebrated in Francis Scott Key’s poem had been designed to link the local to the national by representing the union of the separate states—e pluribus unum, the singular from the plural. But plural usage did not fade away, despite the motto. Writing to Ralph Waldo Emerson in , Walt Whitman could assure him that “the United States . . . are founding a literature.” Only after the Civil War was it considered grammatically correct to use a singular verb with “the United States of America.” While the distinction between individual states and the federal government does not logically match that between “home” and “land,” advocates for both jurisdictions have always exploited these terms in their political rhetoric. The federal government, projecting itself as the “land of the free,” has promoted nationwide standards of health, education, and civil rights; the states, claiming to know the real needs of their people, have represented themselves as the “home of the brave” in their resistance to outside interference. 3. The lyric “Home, Sweet Home,” written by the New York–born actor and poet John Howard Payne (–), had sold over , copies of sheet music even before it appeared in his opera Clari, Maid of Milan at London’s Covent Garden in . Popularized by Jenny Lind, by the s it had swept America. Its appeal was such that on December , , the eve of the Battle of Fredericksburg , a regimental band struck up the melody—and Union and Confederate soldiers, massed for battle along the Rappahannock, stood up and tearfully sang the words together, a scene that the young Winslow Homer sketched in oils. Among the first songs recorded on Edison’s phonograph, it provided no less than six hit records between  and . D. W. Griffith’s first feature-length film, Home, Sweet Home (), used it for a theme. 4. These, needless to say, were the magic words that transported Dorothy back from the palace of Oz to Aunty Em’s cozy kitchen in Kansas. 5. If the phrase “God bless you,” said in response to a sneeze, represents a prayer that the sneezer NOTES 226    – not contract some debilitating disease (the plague? tuberculosis?), perhaps “God bless America” is a formula felt to avert some analogous misfortune in the body politic. 6. See Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape (New York: Riverhead Books, ). 7. See Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), and S. Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (London: Phoenix Books, ). 8. Though I would prefer to use  (Before the Common Era) and  (Common Era), I will use the traditional Christian dating abbreviations, because they will be consistent with most of the texts to which I will refer. 9. Bellah had already published an essay, “Religious Evolution” (in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World [New York: Harper and Row, ]), in which he listed an additional two stages: the early modern, beginning with the Protestant Reformation, and the modern, beginning with Kant. The author’s dropping of the two more recent stages may reflect his second thoughts regarding the hopeful s teleology of that essay. Robert N. Bellah, Varieties of Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, ). 10. Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Crosman (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . 11. See V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts, ), and T. D. Price and G. M. Fineman, eds., Foundations of Social Inequality (Madison, Wis.: Prehistory Press, ). 12. The Genesis story goes on to tell us that farmer Adam’s first begotten, like him a “tiller of the earth,” murdered his brother, a pastoralist. Like Adam, Cain...