Next Friday (Nov 9th) I’ll be hanging out at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University. Why? Well, it’s not because it’s just around the corner from where I live (but, that does help convince me that I’d be a complete moron for not going).
It’s because there are going to be two marvelous storytellers in one auditorium. Essayist David Rakoff and historical travel writer Sarah Vowell (unfair title, I know…more like journalist, humorist, lover of history, social observer, etc.) will be on hand to dispense their wonderful and witty words of wisdom and I surely will be there to soak them up. For those of you who can attend, I highly suggest that you do so. Both Vowell and Rakoff, regular contributors to NPR’s This American Life, are rumored to be captivating and the event is sure to delight. Bellow, I have provided an excerpt from Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. It’s a piece that I found particularly interesting. Enjoy, and I hope to see you there!
I can never make up my mind whether Maryland is offbeat or just off-putting. I probably would have felt that way if I were passing through in the 1860s too. While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was the border state, a schizophrenic no-man’s-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart.
Listen to its state song. Sung to the tune of the German Christmas carol “O Tannenbaum,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” was written as the Civil War was breaking out in 1861. The first line goes, “The despot’s heel is on thy shore.” Who is the despot? The new president, Lincoln, who, it’s worth remembering, had to sneak into Washington for his inauguration so as to avoid the assassins waiting to jump him in Baltimore, a city which, in the song, is rhymed with “patriotic gore,” commemorating the blood spilled on its streets on April 19, 1861, when a mob of local secessionists attacked a Massachusetts regiment passing through town. “Maryland, My Maryland,” the song says “spurns the Northern scum!” The song also calls for seceding from the Union, to stand by its sister state Virginia, going so far as to allude to that state’s motto, Sic semper tyrannis:
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain-
Sic semper! ’tis the proud refrain
Sic semper, of course, was the proud refrain hollered by Maryland’s own John Wilkes Booth after making good on shooting the aforementioned “despot,” Lincoln, at war’s end. One might think that a state song hinting at presidential assassination would have eerie echoes when that state’s native son assassinated said president and therefore it might be headed for the title of “state song emeritus,” the dustbin into which Virginia herself tossed its racist favorite “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” But “Maryland, My Maryland” did not become the official state song until 1939. Despite the occasional nice try to ditch it, it remains the state song to this day.
All of which could just be written of as harmless symbolism, almost laughable anachronism. However, careful readers who are also symbolism devotees would have noticed that the date in 1861 when the Baltimore mob clashed with the Massachusetts soldiers was April 19 – Patriot’s Day – the anniversary of Lexington and Concord, when the first shots were fired in the Revolutionary War. It is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was wearing a T-shirt. On the back of the T-shirt, perhaps as a nod commemorating Patriot’s Day, was the famous quote from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” On the front of McVeigh’s shirt was a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Printed under Abraham Lincoln’s face was the caption, “Sic semper tyrannis.” McVeigh ordered his shirt from a catalog sent out to subscribers of Southern Partisan, the pro-Confederate magazine. As if McVeigh wearing the shirt isn’t disgusting enough, the catalog sold out of most sizes of the shirt after McVeigh made the news. People actually heard that a mass murderer responsible for 168 deaths was wearing clothing celebrating another murder and they wanted to dress up like him. According to media watchdogs Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, by December of that year, the catalog reassured Partisan readers who had ordered the shirt:
Due to a surprising demand for our anti-Lincoln T-shirt, our stock has been reduced to odd sizes. If the enclosed shirt will not suffice, we will be glad to refund your money or immediately ship you anther equally militant shirt from our catalog.
And if the shirts were too big or too small, the readers could have cheered themselves up with one of the fetching, one-size-fits-all bumper stickers like “Clinton’s military: a gay at every porthole, a fag in every foxhole.”
If the shirt’s popularity with readers of Southern Partisan, a magazine on the fringes, seems just that – on the fringes – three years after McVeigh inspired the shirt’s commercial success, a Missouri senator would do an interview with the magazine announcing, “Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson, and [Confederate President Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.” And if that random senator still seems on the fringe, what with representing Missouri and/or kookily complaining about Jeff Davis’s bad rap, it’s worth noting that three years after saying that, the Missouri senator, John Ashcroft, became the attorney general of the United States, which is to say, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in all the land.
