As an addendum to my previous post, I'd like to mention that I've had a song running round and round my head this last week. I get that a lot, but it's not often that the song is an American Civil War marching song. Marching songs seem especially difficult to dislodge - you tend to fall into them just in resuming a walking pace. Since singing it out loud isn't doing the trick of exorcising it, I'll put it down here to see if it goes away.
The song is The Battle Cry of Freedom, and I first heard it last year in the movie Lincoln, in the scene when the Thirteenth Amendment is finally passed. A couple of the Congressman start singing it as a victory chant and it is taken up by the rest of the triumphant Republicans. The Union forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah! Down with the traitors and up with the Star! Give him his due, Spielberg knows when to break out the big guns - like the Marseillaise in Casablanca, a good martial song deployed at the right moment can give history a good kick up the backside.
Alright, so why has a fairly inconsequential moment like that stuck with me, then? Well it hadn't until I saw 12 Years a Slave. Soon after walking out of the film, the tune came unbidden to my head. I hummed it, then looked up the lyrics, and started singing it. Down with the traitors and up with the Star. Now, I imagine I had some need to find something redemptive in all that mess. White guilt, or whatever it is, has one salve when it comes to American Slavery: in the end, the white Northerners did march South and visit destruction on the slavers due to their intransigence. It is not often remembered in those terms in America, for good reason: you can't see the Southerners as the bad guys if you want to get along as a country, God knows it's hard enough as it is. But as an Englishman descended from Southerners, I do see it that way, and when in Slave Brad Pitt's Canadian carpenter warns of the time of reckoning to come, all I could think of were the muddy plains of Gettysburg and Antietam, where the horror of slavery would beaten out of the nation in the mud and the blood.
The white liberals did in the end march south with guns and fury. And perhaps that's how I subconsciously wanted to see myself, the only way you could bring something noble out of it in your mind's eye - the army marching to relive the Solomons of the world from their torment. We are springing to the call of our brothers gone before / and we'll fill their vacant ranks with a million free men more. It's a childish fantasy of course. It was a childish sentiment when the song was written, too - the North was not a noble crusading faction but an industrial power unable to live alongside its agricultural near-neighbour. To call the South "traitors" has always seemed to me bizarre - if a nation wants to secede in my book it has the right to do so. To see the constitution as a legally binding document is a legal fiction, as Thomas Paine had pointed out in Rights of Man seventy years previously:
The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.
How could the South be traitors to a document written by those long dead? And yet sing it out loud, down with the traitors and you know you aren't talking about the constitution. You're calling them traitors to humanity, traitors because they enslaved someone without any right. Childish, yes, but by God does it put a spring in your step. Down with the traitors. Wars need a bit of childishness to get you to go and fight, and if it happens that you're fighting some genuinely awful people, well, a song like that can hold up well over time.
We will welcome to our ranks all the loyal, true and brave / and although they may be poor not a man shall be a slave. The reason I sing it is that it is not just a pushback against the horror I've seen, something in the major key, but it also reminds me that there was a time when the moral path was not jut clear, but had millions of fighting men marching down it, men with guns and artillery and martial songs. I had the ghost of that feeling when Gaddafi's tanks were being torn to shreds by British cruise missiles, sic semper tyrannis indeed. The idea of an armoured fist of liberalism is tempting to the Blairs of this world, and we must be wary of it. But listening to a recent World Service report embedded with the AU armies in Somalia, I started humming it again. Hurrah, boys, hurrah. And what exactly are Al Shabab traitors to, I wonder.
It is part of the need to tell stories to oneself, the need to define enemies, the need to feel you're moving in a direction and with company, that give the great revolutionary and martial songs force. We should be careful it's not distracting us from actual suffering; no doubt the idea of slavery was so awful to me the inner seven-year old wanted to fight it like a Darth Vader baddie. Yet at the same time it is good to remember that liberalism is not only about talking and hand-wringing. If I were an American liberal, I would want to reclaim The Battle Cry of Freedom and The Battle Hymn of the Republic as liberal standards. It may be a bit much to call your political opponents traitors, but freedom does indeed have a battle cry, and after looking on horror it can be good to shout it.
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