Singing ‘American Tune’ off-key

Bruce Lohof
·4 min read

Photo illustration by Getty Images.

“Oh, we come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune
Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right
It’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest.”
— Paul Simon, “American Tune”

 

Paul Simon’s “American Tune” was released in 1973.  The melody is from 16th-century Germany; Simon probably heard it in Bach’s “Passion of St. Matthew” from 1727.  But that’s another story. 

This story doesn’t begin with the melody.  It begins with Simon’s lyrics.  The “Los Angeles Times” later noted that the lines were “mournful, as if unspooling in the candlelight of a day’s end.”  Let me unspool. 

We know what America promised; is this what it has become?

“American Tune” is obliquely political: Oblique because, as Simon later claimed, “I don’t write overtly political songs,” political because, he continued, “‘American Tune’ comes pretty close, as it was written just after Nixon was elected.”  There was plenty in Nixon’s presidency for Simon to dislike.  Some of the more atrocious moments in the Vietnamese war occurred in those days, and Nixon’s responses to antiwar agitations back home were ugly.  And then, of course, there was Watergate, which threatened not only the Democratic Party but Amerca’s two-party system itself.  It turned out, though, that Nixon was a mere prelude.  A recital followed – and continues – in which the “American Tune” is sung off-key.

  • Afghanistan. In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the governing Taliban, primarily because the Taliban wouldn’t apprehend and extradite Osama bin Laden, who was understood to be in seclusion there. American withdrawal wouldn’t occur until 2021, a decade after bin Laden had been exterminated across the border in Pakistan and long after the original goal of the invasion had been forgotten.

  • Iraq. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein, ostensibly to punish terrorists for their 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, and to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi soil. No connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 was ever taken seriously; no weapon of mass destruction was ever found. American withdrawal wouldn’t occur until 2023.  Two decades after the original invasion 2,500 American troops remain in the country.

  • Palestine.  The United States recognized the State of Israel in the earliest hours of its creation in 1948 and, during the years, has donated $300 billion to the cause. At first the aid was mostly developmental; nowadays it’s mostly military.  And nowadays, too, it’s mostly used to sustain the apartheid state that Israel has created throughout Palestine.  “From the river to the sea,” if you’ll excuse an ironic use of the term.  (A moment of silence for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the UK nudged forward the creation of Israel, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”)  Throughout, the U.S. has been reflexively supportive of the State of Israel, even unto genocide, which is the situation in Gaza as I write these lines.

Ignoring this off-key chorus, the average American’s go-to foreign affairs meme is still a Jeep full of GIs distributing Hershey Bars to European children whose freedom they’ve just preserved.  It’s a feel-good image, noble and largely true, but it’s your grandfather’s.  Nowadays, “overseas” – the term itself betrays its own narcissism, doesn’t it? – the memes are different.

  • Memes of occupation.  The U.S. operates nearly a dozen military bases in Germany, nearly two dozen in Japan, fifteen in South Korea.  Nearly a dozen nations in the Middle East host U.S. bases.

  • Memes of aggression.  In the early hours of its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. fired 320 cruise missiles and flew 1,500 air strikes over Baghdad.  The “shock and awe” pyrotechnics were seen by millions of televiewers worldwide. And then, later in the war, rogue American soldiers committed war crimes in the Abu Ghraib Prison, giving to the world a starkly different meme: The infamous image of Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh being tortured made it to the cover of “The Economist.”

  • And yet, also, memes of a dithering giant.  All across Europe, Bürgers and their governments are wondering whether U.S. aid to Ukraine will survive the political theater in Washington.  Or whether the NATO alliance would survive the second coming of Donald Trump.

Nowhere “overseas” will you find that meme of GIs with Hershey Bars.

Will America rediscover the moral high ground?  Will it once again:

“… come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune.”

Perhaps.  God knows, the hours are uncertain.  And America is mighty. Perhaps, too, though, it will simply move into history as just another great power that lost its mojo. Either way, it will have to be:

“… all right, it’s all right
It’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest.”

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