Eisenhower’s
Anthem
By
Francis Scott Key, Dwight D. Eisenhower, James Weldon Johnson and Michael Otieno
Molina
Performed
By Mike Molina for The Real State of the Union
Atlanta,
Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions
February
16th 2014
Key:
Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light
Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Key:
What so proudly we hail at the twilights last gleaming
Eisenhower: This world in arms is not spending money
alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
Key:
And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Eisenhower: This is not a way of life at all in any true
sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Key:
Gave proof through the night, that our flag was still there
Eisenhower: In the councils of government, we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex.
Key:
Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave for the land of the free
Eisenhower: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can
compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of
defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may
prosper together.
War is not a place in time
War is a state of mind
In which politicians proclaim peace
while young dreams die in the streets
In which post-modern plutocrats pontificate on prosperity
while refugees of poverty sleep in prison fatigues
In which media break the tedium by procuring tragedy
To make rage wage war against its own grief
War is a state of mind
Toxic and yellow
caked between the lines of anthems
Where the red glare of pride
Plants its fangs in migrant lives
(GEORGIA HB 87)
Where blues bruised hearts
Embalmed and cold
Turn purple bold
and suit up to shoot up schools
And rock out like cocky jocks out on the farm
Penning girls down
White hot to do harm
War is a state of mind
In which children dine on ground up chicks
While they snipe at frenemies with mouse clicks
In which bots fish like voyeur drones
Prospecting porn on their smart phones
In which black boys are worthless thugs
and white women are devils
And every color is an other
Covered in the veneer of fear
In which women threaten the rule of men
By claiming their own bodies
In which powerful men reference big tents
To create some imagined US against some pretend THEM
War
You can’t touch it, can’t cuff it, can’t place it under arrest
You can’t shoot it, can’t nuke it, can’t stop it with a protest
You can’t torture it out of terrorists
Can’t beat it out of children
You can’t deter it under penalty of death
And it won’t fall with a building
But songs
Songs have defeated its torrents
and its dogs
Pictures
Pictures
have shamed its demons
Words
(I HAVE A DREAM)
Words have shaken us from its nightmare
Poems turned anthems have freed men
James Weldon Johnson:
Sing a song
full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song
full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun
of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won
PEACE
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