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Something Wonderful: Johnny Cash, The Ragged Old Flag

by Vanderleun on February 3, 2020

Debuted yesterday at the Super Bowl. Onward.

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Casey Klahn February 3, 2020, 10:16 AM

I always stand when I see the flag paraded or raised. Even on film.

Didn’t John Ford revere the flag on film? Wasn’t it my grandfather who came from Germany to make a new life in America? Didn’t my father fight under that flag in the cold mountains of Italy? Wasn’t it me who marched on Bicentennial Day and wore the khaki uniform of the US Army?

The NFL can suck my ass. Good for Fox for making this commercial and I stood up. Even though I am here watching alone. I kept the tears back, too, up until I saw the little girl sewing the flag.

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ghostsniper February 3, 2020, 10:34 AM

“The NFL can suck my ass.”
=======
I’m with ya line dawg.
I didn’t look at 1 second of that waste of time.

If you added up the hourly rate for everyone that watched that thing what would the total amount be?

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Terry February 3, 2020, 2:51 PM

God Bless America

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Phil in Englewood February 4, 2020, 4:01 AM

Thank you, Casey. Excellent comment.

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Punditarian February 4, 2020, 9:15 AM

The song is very moving by itself and the video is excellent.
The lyrics however perpetuate a mistake:

“And it almost fell at the Alamo
Beside the texas flag, but she waved on though”

Unless I am very much mistaken, neither the Stars & Stripes nor the Texas Lone Star flag were flown over the Alamo during the battle.
The defenders flew the Mexican tricolor flag, with the date “1824” superimposed on the central white band, referring to the Mexican Constitution of 1824 which had been replaced with a Constitution and a government objectionable to the American colonists.
That is the flag I am flying this month, alongside Old Glory, until March 6, to honor those fighters and martyrs for freedom.

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Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.

— Robert Frost

At the Sulzberger’s Summer Home

Bright blooms of flame spattered shadows on that tide
Whose strangling fingers clawed into our lands,
And scraped out slots, fresh graves upon our sands.

A far-off signal flared and sputtering fell,
Its bloom of sparks erupting deep in slate,
But, like our last edition, this signal came too late.

The drumming bursts of broken cannons
Stomped along the edges of our gilded cage,
And faded like the lies we smeared on our front page,

Faded until all we heard of want or wish or war
Were the screams of our grandchildren slain
Beyond our gilded sand, upon our once fruited plain.

— Van der Leun

My Back Pages

Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”