There's Another National Anthem

For anyone who has seen the early 90's Sondheim musical Assassins--and there can't be that many of us considering how seldom it's staged--this week's events have to bring to mind that work's dark, but undeniable insights. What Sondheim dares to point out is the inscrutable connection between America's bipolar national character--cockeyed optimism one moment, insecurity, paranoia the next--and our near-religious devotion to expressing ourselves with guns.

Not far into an evening spent with the American Pantheon of presidential assassins and wannabes--from John Wilkes Booth to Squeaky Fromme, we hear "The Gun Song." Booth tells us how simple it is to make your mark with a gun:
"And all you have to do
Is move your little finger,
Move your little finger and--
You can change the world.
Why should you be blue
When you've your little finger?
Prove how just a little finger
Can change the world."

Picking up the theme is Charlie Guiteau, who in 1881 shot President James Garfield:
"What a wonder is a gun,
What a versatile invention.
First of all, when you've a gun--
Everybody pays attention."

In a brilliant piece of staging, that last sentence is divided with an ample pause during which the actor playing a weirdly elated Guiteau points a pistol directly into the audience and loudly cocks the trigger. Point made.

In America guns aren't just tools of a trade or pieces of recreational equipment. They are the props of our dignity, the instrument for asserting control over our environment, and in no small way a means of self-realization. And you don't take that feeling of power and presence in the world away from a man without unleashing deep-seated resentments.

So anyone who thinks that one demented college kid out on a Monday morning exercising his constitutional rights is going to queer our national addiction to gunpowder, might as well come back to the flock before Sunday. The pious reflections on brotherhood and community will be ringing out this Sabbath, but there will be no time for politics after prayers. The Democrats won't risk their toe-hold on power for moral disputation with the gun lobby. So it's settled, the problem right now in this country is not too many guns, but too few. The homily of the week goes like this: It's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have one. Consider how many fewer grieving families there would be if students and professors at Virginia Tech had been allowed to carry guns in their backpacks and briefcases. Imagine.

Near the end of Assassins, Sondheim places a complex song that weaves together several themes of the evening--he titles it "Another National Anthem"--but it boils down to admitting we are a divided country, a country of two disassociated populations on two tracks in the pursuit of salvation. One group is squared away, competitive, comfortable with its advantages and accomplishments. That group sings the praises of our nation at every opportunity--at school assemblies, at ball games, at booster breakfasts. Then there's the other crowd. They're struggling with failure, with their own insignificance, with disembodied voices in their heads. They have another national anthem to sing and, as Sondheim says, it's "not the one you cheer at the ball park." This anthem says, "Bullshit!" It says, "Never!" It says, "Sorry!" It says, "Listen!" It's for "the ones that can't get into the ball park."

"There's another national anthem, folks,
For those who never win,
For the suckers, for the pikers,
For the one who might have been...
There are those who love regretting,
There are those who like extremes,
There are those who thrive on chaos
And despair.
There are those who keep forgetting
How the country's built on dreams."

Those guys have Second Amendment rights, too. And that's the song we heard this week.