Posted on 12/23/2001 5:48:52 AM PST by Not gonna take it anymore
In the weeks after Sept. 11, several of my fellow columnists wanted to know why everyone was singing ''God Bless America'' rather than the national anthem. The song was everywhere in those early days, and various musicologists were called upon to speculate learnedly on why this song had caught the public mood: Perhaps ''The Star-Spangled Banner'' requires too great a range, perhaps its complex use of melismas demands a professional vocalist, etc, etc.
All irrelevant. The reason the nation sang ''God Bless America'' is its first seven words. ''The Star-Spangled Banner'' is about a historic event, ''America The Beautiful'' is about the topography, but when it comes to the nation, Irving Berlin said it simplest and said it best:
''God Bless America
Land that I love.''
Berlin was a contemporary of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, but, unlike those sophisticated rhymesters, only he could have written those words without embarrassment. As Jule Styne, the composer of ''Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!'' once said to me about Berlin, ''It's easy to be clever. The really clever thing is to be simple''--to say it directly, unaffectedly, unashamedly:
''God Bless America
Land that I love.''
Irving Berlin was a Jew and he suffered slights: His marriage to a Park Avenue heiress, Ellin Mackay, resulted in her expulsion from the Social Register. In the '30s, her sister moved in with a Nazi diplomat and proudly showed Irving and Ellin her charm bracelet, with its diamond swastika. Throughout his life, fate seemed determined to test to the limit Berlin's faith in both America and the simple certainties of popular song. But he never forgot being a child in Temun, Siberia, when the Cossacks rode in and razed his village, sending his parents scuttling West. About his adopted land, he had no doubts, and his were the words Americans sang in the wake of Sept. 11.
Now President Bush has quietly proclaimed the date Patriot Day. ''God Bless America'' is a good song for that day, just as Berlin anthems mark other high days and holy days on the American calendar--''Easter Parade'' and ''White Christmas.'' When a song's that universal, it floats free of its creator. It's ''by'' Irving Berlin, but so what? The Berlin songbook, in becoming his new homeland's soundtrack, somehow ceased to be his. Because these are the tunes Americans got married to, went to war to, did their Christmas shopping to, it's assumed that that's how they were written--by a Tin Pan Alley opportunist with an eye to the main chance. We forget how much of himself is in those hits.
Christmas was not kind to Irving Berlin. At 5 o'clock on the morning of Christmas Day 1928, his 3-1/2-week-old son, Irving Junior, was found dead in his bassinet. ''I'm sure,'' his daughter Mary Ellin told me a few years back, ''it was what we would now call 'crib death.' ''
Does that cast the sentiments of ''White Christmas,'' written over a decade later, in a different light? The tune is no jingle: It is, in more ways than one, a very Jewish Christmas song, with a plangent, wistful quality, an unsettling chromatic phrase, and an eerie harmonic darkening under the words ''where children listen;'' it's not too fanciful to suggest the singer's dreaming of children no longer around to listen.
Afterward, every Dec. 24, while the rest of the world was humming ''White Christmas,'' the Berlins would explain to their daughters that they had some last-minute preparations to take care of, leave the house and, as the sisters found out many years later, lay flowers on the grave of the baby brother they never knew they had. When the girls grew up and left home, Irving Berlin, a symbol of the American Christmas, gave up celebrating it. ''We both hated Christmas,'' Mrs. Berlin said later. ''We only did it for you children.''
To take a baby on Christmas morning mocks the very meaning of the day. To take Irving Berlin's seems an even crueler jest--to reward his uncanny ability to articulate the sentiments of his countrymen by depriving him of the possibility of sharing them. A pioneer of the inclusive secular American Christmas, Berlin ended his life as neither Jew nor Christian, but an agnostic.
I never knew about Berlin's lost son until his daughter, now Mary Ellin Barrett, told me. A few years ago, we spent one December morning at her apartment plunking out ''White Christmas'' on the piano he wrote it on. Neither of us is any great shakes at tickling the ivories, and it was hopelessly out of tune, but stripped down to its essentials, the song's character seems altogether different from, say, Garth Brooks' take on it. As a child growing up on New York's Lower East Side, Berlin would skip across the street from his orthodox Jewish home to his neighbors, the O'Haras, to play under the Christmas tree and eat the non-kosher food. They had white Christmases in Temun, Siberia, where he was born, but a white Russian Christmas wouldn't be the same: It's not about the weather, it's about home. In 1942, those GIs out in the Pacific, who made the song a hit, understood that. Whatever his doubts about God, Berlin kept faith with his adopted land--and that faith is what you hear in ''White Christmas.''
In the 1980s, in the long twilight of Irving Berlin's life, with loyal retainers holding the world at bay, the bare bones of the curriculum vitae took on mythic status, all the cliches of Ellis Island and the Lower East Side rolled into one all-purpose never-to-be-made Hollywood biopic: little Izzy Baline from Siberia who saw the Cossacks raze his village; the singing waiter who turned his hand to novelty songs; the Tin Pan Alley Jew boy who set his heart on a society bride--Irving Berlin embodies all the possibilities of this land: He came here as poor and foreign and disadvantaged as you can be, and yet he wove himself into the very fabric of the nation. His life and his art are part of the definition of America.
This year, as in 1942, our troops are on foreign soil and foreign seas dreaming of a white Christmas just like the ones they used to know. Spare a thought for them, and for the empty places at the American table this year--for CIA man Mike Spann, for the brave citizen-soldiers of Flight 93, and for all those who set off to work on a beautiful Tuesday morning in mid-September. They died in a great cause:
''God Bless America
Land that I love.''
Mark Steyn is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.
''God Bless America Land that I love.''
For me, that says it all.
Let's not forget Irving Berlin, who made this sentiment possible. An immigrant, he did not take living here for granted as some of the born citizens and illegals do today.
My grandparents immigrated here from Italy and never once did I hear them say, "It's better in Italy" or "I'm an Italian." They would stand up straight and proclaim that they were "Americans."
And proud of it.
God Bless America and God Bless Irving Berlin.
Steyn is always good, but in this piece he outdoes himself. If we're on live on Christmas morning, this story should be the lead piece of the day.
Congressman Billybob
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