I wonder, if he were alive today, what E. E. Cummings would have to say about the war going on in the nation’s capital this month. His satirical poem which begins, “next to of course god america i love you” is dated and about a war long past. We have new wars and new issues.

E.E. Cummings

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

This morning I watched and listened carefully to President Obama’s press conference which gave him an opportunity to address the stalemate between Republicans in Congress and the President over raising the debt ceiling. Throughout the press conference I kept feeling grateful that Americans elected this brilliant, extraordinarily well educated, good man to lead the nation through what has become a potentially crippling economic crisis. I kept wondering what kind of press conference today’s would have been if the Republican candidates for president and vice-president in 2008 were now operating out of the White House. I also kept considering the possibility that if the president were not a person of color he would perhaps not be resented and even despised the way some people despise and resent Barack Obama. A person I know who can’t have forgotten the previous President says the thing he doesn’t like about Obama is his arrogance. Arrogance? My friend wasn’t under a rock somewhere for eight years, so he can’t have forgotten the posturing and upward tilted chin and stumbling, awkward rhetoric of a previous president. Any person who can react to Barack Obama’s wit and intelligence and humility by believing he is arrogant is reacting to something besides the man’s presentation of himself. It is altogether possible that there is a considerable degree of left-over racism in some people, racism that bubbles to the surface when a black person, any black person who does anything except make us laugh or who sings to us or who acts the part of someone else in a movie or on the stage, is in an ultimate position of leadership.

The rhetoric streaming from the Republican leadership circles back often to expressions that I am tired of hearing. I don’t like their “starve the beast” expression when they talk about Washington and the United States Government. The government we have in this country is the best in the world. The Constitution which holds the center of this best country is the clearest, fairest, and most intelligently composed document of its kind in the world. The government of my country is not a “beast.” Some of the folks who obviously like the “beast” label for our government are the same folks who talk about “the mark of the beast” in their religious proclamations about what they consider to be dire conditions in America. One of the strengths of our Constitution is that it makes clear the value of separating church, any church, and state. Ironically, some of the groups that have been successful in interjecting religious language like, “one nation under God,” have themselves been cynical and fearful about American government. They have been the folks who actively lobby and petition local, state, and national legislative to insert more specifically Christian language into official documents and to block the active inclusion and exercise of other religions in American social life. What kind of thinking is behind the expressed fear by a Republican presidential hopeful that we are moving as a nation closer to Sharia law. Wow!

Again, I am grateful that President Barack Obama is the leader of the United States of America, the land that I love. He is one of us. His family is one of our families. He and his family are firmly and comfortably included when we say, “We the people...”