Americans are responsible for some of the greatest music ever produced by human minds and hands. We’re also a feverishly patriotic people. It’s a shame how seldom those two intersect. There’s been some good patriotic music made over the last two-hundred thirty-three years, but most of it unfortunately falls into the same category as Lee Greenwood’s insufferable “God Bless the U.S.A.,” or Neil Diamond’s maudlin and overwrought “Coming to America.” I still dig Sousa, though not as much as I did when I was going through my super-nationalist period as a child during the first Gulf War. And I like our national anthem fine, though my two favorite recordings of it are both instrumental-only (guess — the first one’s easy).

So far as popular music goes, there have only been two truly great patriotic songs to my mind. Each was performed most famously by a legendary singer and musician, and each comes from a great American musical tradition — one from folk, the other from the blues. And they’re both about the same subject, approached from opposite directions. The songs are “This Land is Your Land,” written and popularized by Woody Guthrie, and “This Land is Nobody’s Land,” by John Lee Hooker.

(Ashley will be shocked that I have left out Ray Charles’s immortal rendition of “America the Beautiful,” given how enthusiastically, heedlessly, shamelessly I sing along whenever I play it. It’s definitely a lot more fun to sing than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but it’s a smidge too close to a hymn — and in more ways than just form — for my taste. The Ray Charles version is an example of a great artist making something brilliant and timeless out of lesser source material. That recording, that performance definitely deserves to be mentioned as one of the great patriotic American songs, but the song itself isn’t inherently great. So there. Did that sound enough like some defensive bullshit I just pulled out of my ass?)

Guthrie’s song is great because it does what most other patriotic songs do — celebrate the size and natural beauty of the land belonging to the United States — and also because it does what few others even attempt — it claims ownership of that land for everyone. Check out that famous refrain that closes every verse: “This land was made for you and me.” It’s all-inclusive. He’s not singing “This land, America, is made for you and me, Americans.” He’s singing “this land is made for you and me,” whoever we are. He’s obviously talking about the United States, since he mentions California, New York, the Redwood Forest and the “Gulf Stream waters” of the Atlantic Ocean by name in the first verse. But that’s just where he’s singing from. He could be singing to anybody — native, immigrant, male, female, black, white, whatever. No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, this land with its golden valleys and waving wheat fields and diamond deserts can be your land. That frames the appeal of America directly and poetically, and puts it beyond petty politics. Nevermind all the self-serving bullshit about the “eternal principles” upon which we were founded, or how this is “the greatest country God ever gave man.” Guthrie boils the American dream down to its essence: whoever you are, this can be your country. It’s an ideal we don’t always live up to, but it’s still a great ideal.

The other song many of you may be less familiar with. It was released on John Lee Hooker’s first volume of The Real Folk Blues series from Chess Records. It makes the same point as “This Land is Your Land,” but in a much darker, sadder, more cynical way. Where Guthrie’s song is a jubilant sing-along that claims the wide space of America for everyone who wants it, Hooker’s declares that it can’t actually belong to anybody. “This land is no one’s land,” he sings over the measured noodling of his electric guitar. It’s not a denial of private property rights (that’s actually in Guthrie’s song, in a seldom sung verse). It’s something much deeper. To Hooker all claims of ownership over the land are meaningless because, ultimately, there’s only one thing we’re all going to need it for: “This land is your buryin’ ground.” It’s darker, more pessimistic, like a mirror-image of Guthrie’s song.  But Hooker goes on to state outright the question that Guthrie only implies: “Why are we fighting over this land?” Whether it belongs to all of us or to none of us, it’s an excellent question. Woody Guthrie reportedly wrote “This Land is Your Land” because he was sick of hearing Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio during World War II. When John Lee Hooker released “This Land is Nobody’s Land” in 1966, race riots were breaking out in cities across the country, and the militant black power movement was gaining steam. Put lines like “God made this land / Everybody equal / Why are they fighting over their buryin’ ground?” in that context, and you’ve got not just a great song about America, but one of the most powerful and penetrating sociopolitical statements of the century.

Both songs bring to mind the famous words of a letter to President Franklin Pierce, popularly attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish and Suquamish Indians of Puget Sound, but more likely made up long after the fact by Dr. Henry Smith, who claimed to merely have translated the chief’s original words. Regardless of who wrote them, they’re worth remembering:

How can you buy or sell the sky — the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. . . . Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.

So should it be to all of us. This land, our home, was here long before there was a United States, long before there were any governments, long before the human species or any of its ancestors walked the earth. It will be here long after our country, our laws, our traditions, our artifacts, and every other trace of us has been washed away. And eventually, in the immensity of time, it will disappear as well. Then it won’t matter who the land belonged to.

Now, here in our brief moment in the sun, we should take a moment in between the hot dogs and the fireworks to appreciate the home we’re so fortunate to have, the beautiful land that belongs to all of us, and none of us, that is here for us to share. We should enjoy it, and respect it, and rejoice for it, while we — and it — are still here.

As most of you know, and as my patient sweetheart has long lamented, I’m a fan of pro wrestling. Ask some of your average fans who was the most important pro wrestler ever and you’ll likely wind up with a toss-up between Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan. A few of the kids might throw in a nomination for Steve Austin or The Rock, and a real old timer might suggest Gorgeous George or Lou Thesz, depending on his taste. But if you ask me (and for the sake of expediency I’m assuming you did), there was someone who was way more important than all of those guys, a man who was not only the greatest box office star of his era, but also a key figure in completing the transition of professional wrestling from legitimate sport to the staged, theatrical product we see today. His parents named him Robert Friedrich, but he was best known as Ed “Strangler” Lewis. He was born in the little Wisconsin town of Nekoosa on this date in 1891.

He started wrestling at age 14, taking his ring name from Evan “Strangler” Lewis. That first Strangler was a Wisconsin boy too, born in the even tinier town of Ridgeway in 1860, and the first widely recognized American Heavyweight Champion. That title ceased to exist two years after young Ed began his career, after it was unified with the World Heavyweight Title by Frank Gotch. Back at the turn of the 20^th century pro wrestling was still more sport than show business. Wrestlers would occasionally agree to lose matches ahead of time, and opponents cooperating with each other to make a more entertaining match certainly wasn’t unheard of, but the truly successful wrestlers were all genuine tough guys, and most of the headliners considered working a match (“work” being the vernacular for a match where the outcome is predetermined) beneath them. When Frank Gotch defeated George Hackenschmidt for the World Title in 1908 the bout lasted two hours and ended when Hackenschmidt, fearing Gotch was about to break his leg, surrendered.

In 1914 Ed Lewis hired former wrestler Billy Sandow as his manager. It proved a successful partnership, with Lewis winning the first of his five (or seven, depending how you count) World Heavyweight Championships in 1920. Around this time Lewis and Sandow brought former carnival wrestler Toots Mondt aboard as a trainer and sparring partner. Mondt saw the dwindling attendance at wrestling events and devised a solution, something to stoke the public’s waning interest in the sport. Together, Mondt, Sandow and Lewis developed what Mondt called “Slam-Bang Western Style Wrestling.” Matches now took place in boxing-style rings, had time limits, and included outlandish moves like body slams, suplexes and judo throws, and whips into the ropes instead of the more realistic mat-based style that had dominated pro wrestling since the mid-19^th century.

Since I don’t feel like writing about politics or this or that nerdy pursuit today, and since I’m too lazy to work on the comics for my forthcoming Now That’s Quality Cheese entry on MacGyver, I thought I’d take a gander at the Wikipedia page for today and see what jumped out at me. Turns out there were some interesting people born on this date in history. Here’s a little about three of them.

Today would have been the 121^st birthday of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He was born this date in 1888, in Villafalletto, Cuneo, Italy. Most of us know his name because we dimly remember hearing it in high school, always preceded by “Sacco and”. Both men came to the United States in 1908. In April 1920 they allegedly murdered two men during a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1927 they were both executed for the crime. Today, over eighty years since their execution, whether or not Sacco and Vanzetti actually committed the crimes for which they were executed is almost beside the point. They were not only immigrants, they were members of a group of militant anarchists who had committed several acts of terrorism and advocated violence as a legitimate means of resisting an unjust government. The juries for their two trials were highly prejudiced, their lawyers apparently weren’t that great, and as a result we still have no idea whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty or not. Books have been written arguing both sides. One thing we do know: guilty or innocent, the justice system failed Sacco and Vanzetti. Their executions sparked worldwide protests, and fifty years later Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis officially apologized, for all the good that did.

Today is the 50^th birthday of former pro wrestler Magnum T.A., real name Terry Allen. Before a car accident ended his career in 1986, he was on his way to being a pretty big deal. He made his name working for Jim Crockett Promotions, the most nationally visible territory of the NWA in the 1980s, the home territory of Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen, Dusty Rhodes, Nikita Koloff, the Road Warriors, the Midnight Express, you get the idea. Besides being a decent wrestler, he was also good buddies with Dusty Rhodes, who booked the territory. Were it not for the car accident, Magnum would have been one of the brightest stars in the 1980s wrestling boom. As it happened, he still had a pretty great career. His feuds with Nikita Koloff and Ric Flair are well regarded today, and his “I Quit” steel cage match with Tully Blanchard at Starrcade ‘85 is as brutal a bloodbath as you’d ever want to watch. It ends with Magnum busting apart a wooden chair and spiking one of the broken legs into Tully’s bleeding forehead, while Tully shrieks in agony at the top of his lungs. Pretty sadistic, and enough to make even the most jaded CZW mark turn his head.

Finally, today’s also the 50^th birthday of Hugh Laurie, the best actor on television. Why he has not been buried in Emmys for his lead role in House these last five years I do not know. Before starring as Dr. House, he was writing and acting in British comedy alongside such luminaries as Rowan Atkinson, Robbie Coltrane, and his old buddy from Cambridge, Stephen Fry. And, as all of us who saw his episode of Inside the Actors Studio know, he plays a mean piano and ain’t such a bad singer, either. And he was this close (you should see my fingers, they’re, like, almost touching) to playing Perry White in Superman Returns. He had to bow out because of his shooting schedule on House, which is too bad, ‘cause he’d make an awesome Mr. White (though Frank Langella did just fine, thank you very much). Is there anything about Hugh Laurie not to like? Yes; he’s a motorcycle enthusiast. But shit, nobody’s perfect.

There were also two deaths on this date that caught my attention. The first is John Wayne, one of the great stars in the history of cinema (and generally underrated as an actor, I think), who died thirty years ago today. Roger Ebert wrote a nice remembrance of the Duke a few days ago on his blog. You should give it a read.

The second is DeForest Kelley, the best actor in the cast of the original Star Trek. He died ten years ago today. Before landing the role of Dr. Leonard McCoy, Kelley worked steadily on TV and in the movies, including as an Earp brother in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Of the members of the original Trek cast, he seems to have been the most beloved by his colleagues. I think he would have liked Karl Urban’s take on Dr. McCoy in this year’s Star Trek film. Urban’s performance was the most obvious homage to his predecessor, and so deft that at times it was like having DeForest Kelley with us again. No wonder I liked the movie so much.

As I write this (though probably not as you read it — it’s getting late) it’s June 6. On this date in 1945 over 150,000 Americans, Britons, and Canadians, members of the Allied Expeditionary Force, stormed the coast of Normandy to begin the liberation of Nazi-dominated Europe. It was the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted, and the men who participated in it — thousands of whom were killed, many before they were even able to step off of their landing craft onto the beaches — saved the world.

They saved the world.

It’s a shame that our species considers huge numbers of us killing each other to be so necessary to saving the world, but there doesn’t seem to be any getting around it.

D-Day was a pivotal moment in human history. When you think about it, there haven’t been too many of those. Taming fire, inventing the wheel, learning to speak to one another — those are pretty important moments, assuming you can pin them down to a single day. The first moon landing — that was a big one (and that anniversary’s coming up, too!). There are lots more, but D-Day’s got to be on that list. It was a pretty big day. And it wasn’t all that long ago, relatively speaking.

Sixty-five years have gone by since then. That’s almost 24,000 days. They haven’t all been good days. Not by a long shot. A few have been better for some than for others. But I know this: millions and millions and millions have lived without the weight of fascism pressing down on their chests because of what those 150,000 did on the coast of France on June 6, 1945. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I’m no flag-waver. But I think D-Day transcended nationalism. It wasn’t an American accomplishment, or a British one, or a French one. It was something for which we, the children and grandchildren of the men storming those beaches, can all be grateful.

If that’s not saving the world, I don’t know what you call it.

Something jumped out at me the other day as I watched Christopher Hitchens being interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN’s Q&A. Lamb asked Hitchens about waterboarding, whether or not he considered it torture. Among the many pundits who continue to weigh in on the issue, Hitchens is uniquely qualified, since he has actually been waterboarded. He called it torture. Then he said something very interesting: “The United States has always said of any regime that used it on an American that it is torture.”

No shit?  Turns out Hitchens was right: following World War II, the U.S. played a central role in prosecuting Japanese soldiers for war crimes, including using what they called the “water cure” on Allied prisoners of war. In one such case Seitaro Hata, Yukio Asano, Takeo Kita, and Hideji Nakamura, all members of or contractors to the Japanese Imperial Army, were convicted of waterboarding four American P.O.W’s and sentenced to twenty years of confinement and hard labor.

And lest you think the Bush-era reversal of the ban on waterboarding was just typical “it’s okay when we do it” hypocrisy, there are also several incidents where Americans have been convicted of using waterboarding on prisoners and punished. In 1898 the United States took possession of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. American troops were soon in conflict with Philippine nationalists, and accounts of cruelty and mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of the Americans were soon widespread. The occupation of the Philippines became something of a national scandal, leading to public outcry and congressional inquiries. Eventually Army Major Edwin Glenn was court-martialed and convicted of “resort[ing] to torture with a view to extort a confession,” though Major Glenn’s punishment consisted only of a one-month suspension and a $50 fine.

Okay, so an American soldier getting a slap on the wrist for waterboarding a Filipino prisoner isn’t exactly the unequivocal rebuke of the technique that I would like to be able to point to in this debate. Luckily, that ain’t all I got. There’s also the case of James Parker, Sheriff of San Jacinto County, Texas.

In 1983 Parker and three of his deputies were convicted on multiple counts of using waterboarding to elicit confessions from prisoners. At sentencing the judge called Parker and his fellow defendants “a bunch of thugs,” and said that “the operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country.” Sheriff Parker was ordered to serve 10 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed, and fined $12,000.

The issue seems clear to me. Throughout our history, up until the current decade, waterboarding has always been a form of torture, a punishable crime, no matter who does it, be they members of an enemy army, or one of our own soldiers, or an American law enforcement officer. It has always been a crime, it ought to be, and a free and humane nation of the sort we claim to be should never do it. President Obama, Christopher Hitchens, and law professor and former Judge Advocate General Evan Wallach (who wrote the Washington Post article and the more in-depth report which I used as a source here) are right, and those who continue to justify waterboarding and piss and moan about American agents not using it anymore are wrong.

During his presidency, Rutherford B. Hayes received visitors in the White House every day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., except Saturdays and Sundays. Anyone with public business could stand in line to discuss their concerns with the President of the United States. Hayes received as many visitors as he could during those four hours — the only regular exceptions being Tuesdays and Fridays, when Hayes attended noontime cabinet meetings.

Nowadays, security precautions would never allow the president to be so immediately accessible to the people. But the online town hall meeting in which President Obama participated in earlier today might be the next best thing. It’s a new twist on an old idea, and it’s long overdue.

Speaking via a live video feed from the East Room of the White House, Obama answered questions culled from the world wide web. Visitors to the “Open for Questions” page on the White House website were invited to submit their own questions, and then vote on questions posed by others. The most popular questions were presented to Obama by a moderator, who also took questions from a live audience joining him in the White House, and a few video questions from YouTube.

Yes, it felt too much like a campaign event; and yes, most of the questions allowed Obama to merely reiterate many of his regular talking points, talking up the economic stimulus package and his massive proposed budget. But the event was still important for a larger reason that has little to do with how the questions were chosen, or how canned Obama’s responses were. Here is a president trying his best to remain as close to the people who elected him as possible. Some conservatives will decry it as a ploy by Obama to establish himself as a benevolent dictator, only appearing to solicit input from the voters, or, as Hannity frames it, as evidence of Obama’s addiction to adulation, but those are the hysterias of ideologues. Sure, I’d like to see Barack take some more challenging questions, sure I’d like to see him go off-script and give us a few lines we haven’t heard before, but today’s online Q & A was still a step in the right direction.

The technology to do this has existed for years, and yet Obama is the first president to engage the electorate in this way. Argue that he’s still campaigning, argue that he’s only doing this to push his increasingly unpopular economic agenda — fine, but the fact remains the President of the United States is talking to the people. That’s important. Rutherford Hayes understood that way back in 1871; George W. Bush 130 years later, not so much. Obama gets it. Good on him — and more importantly, good for us.

I don’t know if you’ve heard this yet or not, but today is Abraham Lincoln’s 200^th birthday.

Lincoln is a rare figure. He’s a folk hero who we know actually existed. He might be the most mythologized person in American history — the man born in a log cabin who rose to the highest office in the nation; the rail-splitter, the wrestler, the country lawyer, great emancipator. He’s more than just our greatest president. He’s the great saint of American history, a man strong enough to lead, but not too stubborn to change. We remember Lincoln as the man who freed the slaves, usually forgetting that he was at best a reluctant abolitionist for most of his public career. It wasn’t until the Civil War was well underway that he came to see slavery as truly evil, and ending it as the overriding moral purpose of the conflict. But that’s precisely why my admiration for Lincoln is so immense — he wasn’t born a great man, he grew into one. That statue in Washington is made of marble, but Abe wasn’t.

So that’s Abe Lincoln, born two hundred years ago this very day. Amazingly, this is also the 200^th birthday of another giant of history, Charles Darwin. While Lincoln struggled to end physical slavery, Darwin (an abolitionist himself who took great pride in the end of slavery in his native Britain in 1833) fought against the enslavement of the mind. In 1859, a year before the election of Lincoln, Darwin published On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, which laid the foundation for evolutionary biology. It was Darwin who established the fact that evolution occurred and continues to occur, and Darwin who first constructed the theory that describes its process. If we ever construct a Mount Rushmore for scientists (while I’m on the subject, why the hell haven’t we done that?), Darwin must have his place there alongside Newton, Galileo, and Einstein. His impact on humanity and our understanding of our world and ourselves can’t be overstated.

Their contributions to history speak for themselves, but one of the things I dig the most about Lincoln and Darwin is that they were both prolific writers. Lincoln was by far the most eloquent man ever to serve as President of the United States, and for a sickly little nerd with a butterfly collection, Darwin had quite a way with words his own self. I can’t think of a better way to mark their bicentennials than to let both men speak for themselves.

When American doughboys began arriving in France in 1918, the war had been raging through Europe, Africa, and the Middle East for four years. Fighting along the Western Front in France and Belgium was especially bloody. Allied and German soldiers dug in, constructed long lines of trenches fortified with barbed wire and protected by machine guns, withstood constant artillery bombardment, and tried not to choke to death on the mustard gas, chlorine, and phosgene. There were major losses on both sides, over three million Allies and Germans killed on the Western Front alone, with no major advances for most of the war.

The names are probably familiar, even if you don’t remember what they mean: the Marne, the Somme, Cambrai, Ypres, the Ardennes, the Argonne, Flanders, Verdun.

The terms introduced or popularized by the war may only evoke a faint recognition today, but they still carry a chill. They have been stamped on our collective subconscious: trench foot, devil’s paintbrush, U-boat, stormtrooper, zero-hour, over the top, no-man’s-land.

It was a long war, and a bloody war, and ultimately a vain war. It was called the war to end all wars, yet just twenty years after it officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Adolf Hitler’s army invaded Poland, igniting the Second World War.

Unofficially, the war ended with the signing of an armistice between the Allies and the Germans in a railroad car in the Compiègne Forest. The armistice was signed early on the morning of November 11, 1918. It went into effect at 11 a.m., the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, ensuring generations of future high school history students would get at least one test question correct. Since then, Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day, has been marked throughout the western world every eleventh of November. Originally set aside to memorialize the end of the First World War, it has evolved over the last ninety years into a day to honor those who fought in all wars, wherever and whenever. Since 1954 it has been known as Veterans Day here in the United States.

In Belgium they call it the Day of Peace. It’s marked by the display of poppies and recitations of “In Flanders Fields,” a poem written by Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae on a scrap of paper as he stood in the midst of the Second Battle of Ypres. I first heard it on November 11, 1994, the first of the four Veterans Day assemblies I attended at Clear Spring High School. Jim Hutson, history teacher, Marine, and Vietnam War veteran, recites it every year:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Millions of French, British, German, Belgian, Italian, and Russian troops were killed during the war, but the final recorded combat death was an American, Henry Gunther. He was a Maryland boy, born and raised in Baltimore. He had been behaving recklessly since being demoted in rank from sergeant to private for writing a letter to a friend that was critical of the Army. On the morning of the armistice Gunther’s company was positioned opposite a German machine gun in Ville-devant-Chaumont, a little village near Verdun. At 10:30 they were informed of the imminent ceasefire. With the end of the war seconds away, Gunther leapt from his position and charged the Germans, firing his rifle through the thick fog. The confused Germans shouted at him to stop, that the war was over. Gunther kept charging. The Germans had no choice. They fired their machine gun, and Gunther fell.

The Germans who killed him rolled Gunther onto a stretcher and carried him back to the American lines, where he was buried. His time of death was listed as 10:59.