SPIRITUAL DESTINY OF AMERICA: Theatrical
Adaptation
A Rock'n'Roll Version of the Heroes
and Heroines of American History
from the Idealistic and Utopian Point of View
Lyrics, Music, and Book compiled by Maryellen McCabe
Copyright l992
Destiny of America can be the Hair of the 90's.
- Ned Metola, former creative director of Grey Advertising
I salute Maryellen McCabe for her vision and her creativity.
- Gov. Mario Cuomo
This is great rock music with a message.
- Emily Laber, Gannett Newspaper
SPIRITUAL DESTINY OF AMERICA is an epic rock
musical celebration of the history of the United States, featuring
the writing of Francis Bacon, John Masefield, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, Sojourner Truth, Mark
Twain, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein,
Robert Frost, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Pete Hamill, and
Abraham Maslow.
The staging of the script is to involve film and slide projection,
taped and live sound accompanying the written word to form a mixed
media collage.
A full seven piece band is center stage with five platforms at different
levels surrounding the band. The cast includes twelve actor-singer-dancers,
and seven musicians.
Behind the band and platforms are three rear projection screens.
A chorus of voices opens the show singing:
Chorus:
There is a Destiny
To help humanity.
(Repeat three times)
culminating in the lyric:
To Build Plato's New Atlantis
was the vision of Sir Francis
Visuals depicting ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND and the INQUISITION form
a background as the NARRATOR speaks:
In Elizabethan England, the age of Francis Bacon, the evils of
the Dark Ages and the fight against feudalism were by no means over.
The spirit of unrest and change was in the air. The social life
of the common people was for ages wretched in the extreme, and the
majority lived in hovels.
The church was at full blast destroying heretics with torture, fire
and the sword; selling indulgences for crime and vice to all who
had money to pay for "priestly pardons." But, secretly
scattered throughout the continent were little knots of intellectuals
and spiritually minded men who were secretly striving to bring about
a new order of society to free the masses of church and State, and
to inculcate the idea of education and freedom of thought as the
true pathway to progress.
While serving his diplomatic apprenticeship at the French Court
of Navarre, Francis Bacon was initiated into the new liberalism
represented throughout Europe by secret societies of intellectuals
dedicated to civil and religious freedom. He returned to England
fully aware of the sinister intentions of the Inquisitional Spanish
King who was resolved to control England for religious and secular
reasons.
In order to prevent the Spanish domination of the new world, Francis
Bacon masterminded the English colonization plan for America, cherishing
as he did his Utopian Dream of the Great Commonwealth of his New
Atlantis; free of a dominant clergy and entrenched Aristocracy.
Alfred Dodd
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't.
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all, that they
consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek
it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for
superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or for
any of these inferior things; but for the benefit, and use of life;
and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from
lust of power that the angels fell; from lust of knowledge that
man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel
or man ever come in danger by it....let us hope there may spring
help to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some
degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.
Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration
It is the great discovery of the age...the world will ring with
it...Francis Bacon, Bacon only had written the Shakespeare drama.
Mark Twain, Bigolow Biography
SONG # 1: SIR FRANCIS BACON: THERE IS A DESTINY
SIR FRANCIS BACON
Chorus:
There is a destiny to help humanity
There is a grand design
It began in an ancient time
To build Plato's New Atlantic
Was the mission of Sir Francis
Like Prometheus reaching to heaven for fire,
to bring to the earth what God inspired
the spear shaking poet Lord Bacon conspired,
A Utopian land, the brotherhood of man.
(Chorus)
Like Arthurian knights who search for the Grail
There's a story to tell; it's like a fairy tale
With his Rosy Cross band,
Together they planned,
a Utopian Land, the brotherhood of man.
The mind of Science
Like Satan's defiance
Shall lead mankind astray
Love must guide the mind on its way.
(Chorus)
Centuries before Columbus arrived in the New World, democracy as
practiced by the Native American Iroquois League was alive and well
waiting for the founding fathers to discover it. The Native American
teaching particularly as exposed by Hiawatha, founder of the great
Iroquois League of Peace, had a tremendous influence on Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Many of the ideas of Hiawatha became
incorporated into our constitution.
I am of the opinion...that securing the friendship of the Indians
is of the greatest consequence for these colonies...The colonists
should accept the Iroquois advice to form a union in common defense
under a common, federal government...
Benjamin Franklin
Brothers, our forefathers rejoiced to hear Canassatego [of the
Iroquois] speak...[His words] sunk deep into our hearts. The advice
was good. It was kind. They said to one another: 'The Six Nations
are a wise people, let us hearken to them, and take their counsel;
and teach our children to follow it,' Our old men have done so.
They have frequently taken a single arrow and said, Children, see
how easily it is broken. Then they have taken and tied twelve arrows
together with a strong string or cord and our strongest men could
not break them. See, said they, this is what the Six Nations mean.
Divided, a single man may destroy you; United, you are a match for
the whole world...
Benjamin Franklin
Here is what Cadwallader Colden (Johansen, l982, xiv), a contemporary
of Benjamin Franklin, said about the Iroquois:
[The Indians] have 'outdone the Romans'...[They have] a social
and political system so old that the immigrant Europeans knew nothing
of its origins-a federal union of five (and later six) Indian nations
that had put into practice concepts of popular participation and
natural rights that the European savants had thus far only theorized.
The Iroquoian system, expressed through its constitution 'The Great
Law of Peace,' rested on assumptions foreign to monarchies of Europe:
it regarded leaders as servants of the people, rather than their
masters, and made provision for their leaders' impeachment for errant
behavior. The Iroquois' law and custom upheld freedom of expression
in political and religious matters and it forbade the unauthorized
entry of homes. It provided for political participation by women
and relatively equitable distribution of wealth...
SONG #2 HIAWATHA
HIAWATHA
Once upon the medicine wheel,
the sacred hoop, the karmic reel
Deganawida taught a brave to heal the warrior wounds of war
"Hiawatha" he implored, "bring my peace to all nations"
and for 12 generations
The Great Spirits ways walked the land
and the peace tree he planted still stands
Chorus:
We are one, we are one,
Hiawatha's song shall be sung
We are sisters, we are brothers,
we are children of the mother
we are one, we are one.
Hiawatha smoked the great peace pipe
seven rings reached heaven's heights
where the thunder bird spread her wings
and the hummingbird began to sing.
Yellow, black, red and white
the rainbow tribes of man unites
and the Great Spirit's ways walked the land
and the peace tree he planted still stands.
Bridge
He brought a new order for the ages
And the bloody war painted pages
of history, made way for unity.
In a rare old book, owned by the late A.P. Warrington,...is an
account of a speech made by an unknown Patriot at the time of the
signing of the Declaration of Independence.
A group of men gathered in the old State House in Philadelphia
on July 4, 1776, preparatory to signing the Declaration. Among them
were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and John
Adams. It was late in the afternoon and they had not signed the
Declaration. These men realized that they were faced with the death
penalty for high treason if the Revolutionary War failed....Naturally,
they were reluctant to sign the document, and their courage seemed
to wane.
Suddenly a strong voice sounded from the balcony. A man was speaking
to the group of men.
"They may stretch our necks on all the gibbets in the land,
they may turn every rock into a scaffold, every tree into a gallows,
every home into a grave, and yet the words of that parchment can
never die! They may pour blood on a thousand scaffolds, and yet
from every drop of blood that dyes the ax, a new champion of Freedom
will spring into birth! You cannot blot out the words of God written
on that parchment there. The works of God may perish, His words,
never!
"The words of the Declaration will live in the world long after
our bones are dust. To the mechanic in his workshop they will speak
hope, to the slaves in the mines, Freedom, but to the coward kings,
these words will speak tones of warning they cannot choose but hear.
"Sign that parchment! Sign! if in the next moment the gibbet's
rope is about your neck! Sign! by all your hopes in life or death,
as men, as husbands, as fathers, brothers! or be accursed forever.
Sign! not only for yourselves but for all ages, for that parchment
will be the textbook of Freedom, the Bible of the rights of men
forever.
"Nay, do not start and whisper with surprise. It is true -
your own hearts witness it! God proclaims it. Look at this strange
band of exiles and outcasts, suddenly transformed into a people,
a handful of men, weak in arms but Mighty in God-like faith. Look
at your recent achievements - your Bunker Hill, your Lexington,
and then tell me, if you can, that God has not given American to
be free!
"I beg you to sign that parchment for the sake of these millions
whose very breath is now hushed in intense expectations as they
look up to you for the beautiful words. YOU ARE FREE!
"Were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity, were this
hand freezing to death, were this voice choking in the last struggle,
I would still, with the last gasp of that voice, implore you to
remember this truth -God has given America to be Free!"
The unknown speaker sank exhausted in his chair. The men, fortified
with his enthusiasm, rushed forward. John Hancock was the first
to snatch up the quill and pen his name. He had hardly finished
before the quill was groped by another, and then another, and yet
another. Finally, it was done.
They turned to thank the man for his inspiring words, but he was
not there, and unfortunately no one knew who he was or where to
find him.
SONG #3 THOMAS JEFFERSON: BRING DOWN THE GILDED CROWN
THOMAS JEFFERSON
He was noble and strong.
He would right the wrongs.
The slaving schemes
of the Kings and Queens
And the churches wars,
the preaching whores
Who use God like a fearful sword
and commit crimes in the name of the Lord.
(Chorus)
Bring down the gilded crown.
It's the end of the age of Kings.
Let the bells of freedom ring.
Let the bells of freedom ring.
The rebel declared...
"The world shall be fair,
If we must fight, we shall have life.
And liberty, America shall be free.
Tis the land of opportunity."
Bridge
He plowed with his pen paradise land,
To harvest the hope, the family of man;
his name was Jefferson.
...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...
Thomas Jefferson
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, "New Colossus" - used on the Statue of
Liberty
SONG: GIVE ALL TO LOVE
Music by Maryellen McCabe
Words by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, ... credit and the Muse,--
Nothing refuse.
...It was never for the mean;
It requireth courage stout.
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending,
It will reward,-
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.
Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behooved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,-
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, forever,...
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, ...credit and the Muse,--
Nothing refuse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here
let there be what the earth waits for,--exalted manhood. What this
country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract
its materialities....
Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own;..."
What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism:
Idealism as it appears in l842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided
into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; ... The materialist
insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and
the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and
of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
CONCORD HYMN
Sung at the completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In October, l840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:-
We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social
reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in
his waistcoat pocket.
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
we will speak our own minds....A nation of men will for the first
time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine
Soul which also inspires all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
REPRISE OF GIVE ALL TO LOVE
(Narrator in character:)
Mr. Lincoln, the woman said, I never heard tell of you before they
put you up for president. But I heard of you, the President answered,
smiling.
...She was called 'a sign unto the people.' None who ever met her
could forget her. Harriet Beecher Stowe could not recall 'anyone
who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal
presence.''Chillun, I talk to God, and God talks to me,' Sojourner
Truth told everyone, high or humble. She began her dialogue with
God as a whipped slave child...and continued it in log cabins and
mansions, in county courtrooms and the U.S. Senate chamber...
'Well, chillun, where there's so much racket there must be something
out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the niggers of the South and
the women at the North all a-talking 'bout rights, the white men
will be in a fix pretty soon...'
'Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as
much rights as men 'cause Christ warn't a woman. Where did your
Christ come from?'
...'Where did your Christ come from?'
'...From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with it!'
Her Name Was Sojourner Truth, Hertha Pauli
SONG #4: SOJOURNER TRUTH
SOJOURNER TRUTH
Chorus:
Chillun, she said, I talks to God
and God talks to me.
He's saying, "Sojourner Truth
you've got to stop the slavery."
Sing out sister with the love of your heart
Sing sister and the water will part
Like Moses crossing the red sea
Sojourner Truth set your people free.
Sing out sister against the hate
Sing our sister with a fearless faith
Take up my cross and walk the land
Jesus shall be your eyes and hands.
Don't worry if you can't read or write,
It doesn't matter you've got Solomon's sight
and a mother's heart and a silver tongue
to speak out about the wrong being done...yes the
cruel torture of the slaves,
the whipping by the minds depraved,
the lowest of the low, who take joy
at seeing black mamas, and the daddies and boys
crawling on their bellies with their spirits destroyed.
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-
crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning
Here Captain! dear father!
The arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and
done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won:
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
This Dust Was Once the Man
This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
SONG #5: BROTHER FOUGHT BROTHER
BROTHER FOUGHT BROTHER
Chorus:
Brother fought Brother
They killed one another
War ... bloody war
spread through the land.
Brother fought Brother
They killed one another
War ... bloody war
spread through the land.
A house divided cannot stand.
Oh the Blue and the Grey coats marched along.
The bugles reveled a soldier's song.
They were all brave boys
with courageous dreams
who became bitter men by the age of 18.
And the glamour of battle
soon lost its charm,
When your cannon ball fodder
missing legs and arms
Where's the glory of the flag
and the glamour of war,
When the maggots are lodging
in your wounds and sores?
(chorus repeat)
In the middle of the night
there were noonday skies
and the fires from hell
to the heavens did arise.
Sherman torched Atlanta
with the wrath of mars
and the south will forever
bear the scars.
Sherman's march to sea
was a senseless slaughter,
the bluecoats raped
all the Georgia daughters.
They begged for mercy
and they screamed with fear.
The bluecoats laughed
with a vengeful jeer.
(chorus repeat)
Bridge
What happened to the grand plan?
The founding fathers family of man?
What happened to the home of the free?
The lady weeps for liberty.
Men rule with an iron hand
Marshall law has taken over the land.
(Chorus repeat)
(Members of the chorus. Each take a quote:)
For twenty-five or thirty years I have squandered a deal of my time--too
much of it perhaps--in trying to guess what is going to be the process
which will turn our republic into a monarch and how far off that
event might be.
For fifty years our country has been a constitutional monarchy,
with the Republican party sitting on the throne.
...Ours is not only a monarchy but a hereditary monarchy--in the
one political family. It passes from heir to heir as regularly and
as surely and as unpreventably as does any throne in Europe. Our
monarch is more powerful, more arbitrary, more autocratic than any
in Europe, its White House commands are not under restraint of law
or custom or the Constitution, it can ride down the Congress as
the Czar cannot ride down the Duma....It can pack the Supreme Court
with judges friendly to its ambitions, and it has threatened--by
the voice of a Secretary of State--to do this....
By a system of extraordinary tariffs it has created a number of
giant corporations in the interest of a few rich men, and by most
ingenious and persuasive reasoning has convinced the multitudinous
and grateful unrich that the tariffs were instituted in their interest.
For years the rich corporations have furnished vast sums of money
to keep the Republican party in power, and have done this upon the
understanding that their monopolies were to be shielded and protected
in return...
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not
merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet....Our standards
were fairly high a generation ago, and they had been brought to
that grade by some generations of wholesome labor on the part of
the nation's multitudinous teachers; but Jay Gould, all by himself,
was able to undermine the structure in half a dozen years; and in
thirty years his little band of successors...have been able to sodden
it with decay from roof to cellar and render it shaky beyond repair...
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those
three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of
conscience, and the prudence never to exercise either of them.
Mark Twain
SONG #6: HALLEY'S COMET (MARK TWAIN)
HALLEY'S COMET
Chorus:
On the tail of Halley's Comet from Jupiter he came
To Hannibal Missouri
with the pen name Mark Twain
And the Mississippi mother was his home
And the love of his life was St. Joan
With his corn pone opinion
he challenged the dominions
of the teachers and the preachers who would pray.
Will that heathen laughing go away.
And with the sword of his humor he would slay
all the Christian demons
and Republican's scheming
to market a monarch to the land,
with a dollar bill scepter in their hands.
(Chorus)
Like the robe of an angel is his suit of white.
The Connecticut Yankee was King Arthur's knight.
His charming comedy was born from tragedy,
for he saw more than other men could see,
His conscience too keen to let him be...
He was the jester for the free.
Bridge
Now the stagecoach is a limo,
and the riverboats a yacht,
and the Mississippi magic the nation has forgot,
and the boy named Tom Sawyer has become a busy man
with a Ph.D. and a law degree,
his soul is crippled as he stands.
And he mourns at the funeral of this man.
...So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only
thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified
terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance....
...a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence,
and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish
optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance....Nature still
offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is
at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very
sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange
of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and
their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.
Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the
court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
...The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple
of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient
truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which
we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
...These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach
us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister
to ourselves and to our fellow men.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, Washington, March
4, l933
SONG #7: THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF
THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF
Chorus:
There is nothing to fear but fear itself
If you have courage, if you have faith,
then you have wealth,
said the crippled man with polio
in his fireside chats on the radio.
How do the despots come to power?
Fear lets them have their day.
How can the people sit back and cower?
Fear makes their hearts betray...
and the dictators get their way
(Chorus)
And did you know the great Catholic pope
with his crucifix and his golden cloak
he could have stopped the death camps
with one letter with the Vatican stamp.
(Chorus)
Few women in American history had posed to themselves more steadily
questions like "what am I here for, what is life's purpose,
who am I?" The spirit that had prompted such questioning had
infused the Roosevelt years. The American Great Seal contains an
open eye within a radiant nimbus at the tip of a pyramid above which
is the inscription annuit coeptis--"he smiles at our undertaking."
Joseph Lash
While she was with us...no man had to feel entirely alone.
Doris Fleeson
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent
human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanor Roosevelt
The hysteria that swept the country in the postwar years was her
chief concern....one of her letters to President Truman was devoted
to the matter of witch-hunts:
It happens that I have given up any activities with the Progressive
Citizens of America because I am convinced that there are people
in the top levels of that organization that still are clearly connected
with the Communist Party in this country or who are too chicken-hearted
and afraid of being called red-baiters. Therefore, they serve the
purposes of the party....
But people should not be condemned because they were members of
the PCA:
I remember when my husband and I heard about a list the FBI had
of organizations that were considered subversive and anyone who
had contributed to these organizations was automatically considered
to be questionable. My husband told me that I could ask to see it
and we spent an evening going through it and believe it or not,
my husband's mother was one of the first people named because she
had contributed to a Chinese relief organization and both Secretary
Stimson and Secretary Knox were listed as having contributed to
several organizations....
Forgive me for writing a long letter again but I have been troubled
by what looks like a real chance that some of the methods of the
Russians might be coming our way.
...[W]hen you cease to make a contribution you begin to die....Therefore,
I think it a necessity to be doing something which you feel is helpful
in order to grow old gracefully and contentedly.
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places,
close to home--so close and so small that they cannot be seen on
any maps of the world. Such are the places where every man, woman
and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity,
without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there,
they have little meaning anywhere.
My own approach to any difficulties that emerge among the United
Nations is that there is one paramount thing to remember--namely
that we have discovered super weapons of destruction. If we wish
we can destroy ourselves and our entire civilization. If we do not
wish to do this, then we must learn to get on together without war.
That entails the success of the UNO.
The job of writing a peace and then building a peaceful world through
the United Nations Organization based on that peace is not the job
alone of the government officials....It is the job of the peoples
of the world, and it will be done only if they put their strength
back of their representatives and insist that the main objectives
of keeping peace in the world shall always be in the forefront of
everybody's mind.
Eleanor Roosevelt
SONG #8: SHE: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
SHE
Chorus:
The enemies wanted to tie her tongue;
to shut her up the mud was slung.
For speaking out she must atone;
A woman's place is in the home.
But she ... had a mind of her own;
She had a mind of her own.
While the blue blood ladies were sipping tea
and talking of recipes,
She ... was with the hungry.
She was on the bread lines.
And while the blue bloods went out to dine
to drink their prohibition wine,
She was saving children
from sweat shops and coal mines.
(Chorus)
And when McCarthy made a land of fear,
and the nation whispered in case he'd hear,
and the black list destroyed careers,
She said we must not be afraid,
and let the F.B.I. come raid
our thoughts, our hearts, our homes.
Joe McCarthy must be taken off his throne.
(Chorus)
Bridge:
She was the conscience
of a generation.
She was the first lady
of all nations.
(Chorus)
I say to you today, even though we face the difficulties of today
and tomorrow. I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted
in the American Dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will
rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these
truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,'
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of
former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to
sit down together at the table of brotherhood....
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in
a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character.
...So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. But not
only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let
freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every
mountain side.
When we allow freedom to ring--when we let it ring from every city
and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able
to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white
men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able
to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual 'Free
at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty. We are free at last.'
Martin Luther King
SONG #9: LOVE SHALL MAKE THE ENEMIES WEAK
MARTIN LUTHER KING
I remember when Dr. King would speak
CHORUS:
He said, "Love shall make the enemies weak
when you turn the other cheek.
Though they beat you to the ground
we shall overcome with unified sound
and like the walls of Jericho,
the hatred shall come tumbling down.
Don't go walking to the back of the bus
You stay up front and make a peaceful fuss.
Tell the driver you would rather go to your grave
than be treated like a slave.
Walk right up to the front of that school-
integration is the law and the rule.
We won't be kept illiterate fools
We all have minds to shine like jewels.
(Chorus Repeat)
(Note: A cello version of Jimi Hendrix's version of the Star Spangled
Banner plays underneath the following recitation of Mark Twain's
words, widely used during the Viet Nam protest in the sixties.)
I pray to you to pause and consider. Against our traditions we
are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a
helpless people, and for a base object--robbery. At first our citizens
spoke out against this thing by an impulse natural to their training.
Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused
this change? Merely a politician's trick--a high-sounding phrase,
a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our
Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was
shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit....the
War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed
to shout it, or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor--none but
those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and
keep on saying, 'Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on
the little war. Have you not perceived that phrase is an insult
to the nation....
Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his
government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.
This Republic's life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor
for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage
and is drifting, it helm is in pirate hands. The stupid phrase needed
help, and it got another one: 'Even if the war be wrong we are in
it and must fight it out: we cannot retire from it without dishonor.'
Why, not even a burglar could have said it better. We cannot withdraw
from this sordid raid because to grant peace to those little people
upon their terms--independence--would dishonor us. You have flung
away Adam's phrase--you should take it up and examine it again.
He said, 'An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war,'
You have planted a seed, and it will grow.
Mark Twain on the Philippine War, as widely used in the anti-Vietnam
War protest in the sixties.
(Note: image of JFK's first inaugural address occurring with Frost's
poem:)
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The Young Kennedy girls were crying and wailing, knowing, I suppose,
what the guys my age discovered in Dallas: Youth was over. 'Sick,'
one girl kept saying. 'Sick. Sick. What kind of country is this?
Sick. Sick.' Outside, there were cops everywhere and sirens. The
cops were trying to get one of the wounded into a taxi. The cabby
didn't want to take him, afraid, I suppose, that blood would sully
his nice plastic upholstery.
When we got through the police barricades, we drove without talk
to the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, listening to the news on
the radio. The unspoken thought was loudest: The country's gone,
Medgar Evers was dead, Malcolm X was dead. Martin Luther King was
dead, Jack Kennedy was dead, and now Robert Kennedy was dying. The
hell with it. The hatred was now general....
I remembered the night in 1964, in that bitter winter after John
Kennedy's murder, when Robert Kennedy appeared at a St. Patrick's
Day dinner in Scranton, Pennsylvania....Bob told them about Owen
O'Neill, an Irish patriot whose ideals had survived his martyrdom.
Men were crying as he read the old Irish ballad:
Chorus sing:
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?Why did you die? ...
We're sheep without a shepherd,
When the snow shuts out the sky.
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?
Pete Hamill
SONG #10: O SAY CAN'T YOU SEE
O SAY CAN'T YOU SEE, THERE'S A CONSPIRACY
It was a cold, dark Saturn season,
And the leaders of treason
came to fame.
Oh the brothers of darkness reign.
The flame of truth became
like smoke,
and with cloaks and daggers
like the KGB
They have hidden lady liberty.
Chorus:
O Say can't you see,
there's a conspiracy.
O Say can't you see,
there's a conspiracy.
It was a cold, dark Saturn season,
And the leaders of treason
came to fame.
Oh the brothers of darkness reign.
Robber barons rule again
making money is the rainbow's end.
You've got to carve out your own niche, they say
or you will starve
digging your ditch someday.
(Chorus)
O Say can't you see,
there is a conspiracy
and I swear they killed the Kennedy's.
I swear they killed the Kennedy's.
It was a cold, dark Saturn season,
And the leaders of treason came to fame.
Oh the brothers of darkness reign.
Cocaine money made a weapon's deal.
The White House would lie and steal.
Like the Sheriff of Nottingham,
they tax the poor for a banking scam.
O Say can't you see,
there is a conspiracy.
O Say can't you see,
there is a conspiracy.
Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Some people see things as they are and ask why; I dream things
that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw
SONG #11: IF NOT YOU
IF NOT YOU
Where there is no vision a people perish,
Where there are no dreams to cherish, a nation dies.
Where are the leaders like Jefferson?
Where are the heroes and heroines?
Where are the people who see the work to be done?
(Chorus)
If not you, who will be the answer?
If not you, who will heal the cancer?
If not you, then who?
Who will tell the children they can fly?
Who will play the Catcher in the Rye?
Why in schools do the minds all die?
Who will hear the cries of the third World poor?
Who will stop the Holocaust of a Nuclear War?
Where are all the ladies to hold
Athena's sword?
(Chorus Repeat)
THE END
Copyright © 1992 Maryellen McCabe
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