Do they teach this in grade school?!?
It is a truth re-discovered every generation or so that the state song of Maryland ("Maryland, My Maryland" by James Ryder Randall) is a little bit out of date-about 150 years out of date by now. I mean, I first heard this some 30 years ago now, but there was no Internet back then and I don't seem to have bothered to go look up the full lyrics at the time. Well, I finally got around to looking it up, and wow, yeah. Not only does the song refers to Lincoln (or perhaps, thinking charitably, to a personification of the Union) as "despot," "tyrant," and "vandal," but it compares allegiance to the Union to "crucifixion of the soul"-don't just take my word for it, you can look it up yourself. I'm sure they don't sing it all the way through, anyway: teachers wouldn't dare try to teach that last line (the one right after "Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!") to middle-school boys, for one thing. All in all, I rather appreciate the Capitol Steps' lines from their suggested replacement song:
Our song before was full of gore / But we heard the Union won the war;
We're sorry if it made you mad / It was the only song we had.
(For that matter, I never knew that "All Hail to Massachusetts" included the words "live long and prosper," so there.)
In completely unrelated news, we seem to have new neighbors moving into No. 8. Will have to go meet them some day that's less pouring rain.
Our song before was full of gore / But we heard the Union won the war;
We're sorry if it made you mad / It was the only song we had.
(For that matter, I never knew that "All Hail to Massachusetts" included the words "live long and prosper," so there.)
In completely unrelated news, we seem to have new neighbors moving into No. 8. Will have to go meet them some day that's less pouring rain.