In an annual rite of late spring, I chide the affable minister of my wife's Presbyterian church for the congregation's singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the Sunday before Memorial Day—the ersatz Memorial Day created by the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, that is.
“It's a glorification of war,” I tell her, “composed by a Unitarian who gets off on the thought of all those Southern boys with their guts shot out.”
She concedes the point, but, well, it is also a singularly stirring anthem, a rousing affirmation of the singer's righteousness, a note stretching across a century and a half assuring us that although the United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” as Jimmy Carter says, it hasn't all just been senseless slaughter.
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