Monday, March 18, AD 2024 10:55pm

American History Sign Off

The things you find on the internet!  Before most stations went 24 hours a day, tv stations when they signed off would usually play the Star Spangled Banner.  The above is a version I treasured in my mispent nocturnal youth.

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me I think the version I saw did not have the flag graphics and had more coverage of American history.  I distinctly recall Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders on San Juan Hill and MacArthur wading ashore at Luzon.  Oh well, YouTube beggars can’t be choosers.

Whenever I see a broad panoramic view of American history, I always think of these lines from The Devil and Daniel Webster by Stephen Vincent Benet, just as Daniel Webster begins to make his closing argument to the jury of the Damned:

For it was him they’d come for, not only Jabez
Stone. He read it in the glitter of their eyes and
in the way the stranger hid his mouth with one
hand. And if he fought them with their own
weapons, he’d fall into their power; he knew
that, though he couldn’t have told you how. It
was his own anger and horror that burned in
their eyes; and he’d have to wipe that out or the
case was lost. He stood there for a moment, his
black eyes burning like anthracite. And then he
began to speak.

 He started off in a low voice, though you could
hear every word. They say he could call on the
harps of the blessed when he chose. And this
was-just as simple and easy as a man could talk.
But he didn’t start out by condemning or reviling.

 He was talking about the things that make
a country a country, and a man a man.

 And he began with the simple things that
everybody’s known and felt-the freshness of a
fine morning when you’re young, and the taste of
food when you’re hungry, and the new day that’s
every day when you’re a child. He took them
up and he turned them in his hands. They were
good things for any man. But without freedom,
they sickened. And when he talked of those en-
slaved, and the sorrows of slavery, his voice got
like a big bell. He talked of the early days of
America and the men who had made those days.
It wasn’t a spread-eagle speech, but he made you
see it. He admitted all the wrong that had ever
been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong
and the right, the suffering and the starvations,
something new had come. And everybody had
played a part in it, even the traitors.

Then he turned to Jabez Stone and showed

him as he was-an ordinary man who’d had hard
luck and wanted to change it. And, because he’d
wanted to change it, now he was going to be
punished for all eternity. And yet there was good
in Jabez Stone, and he showed that good. He
was hard and mean, in some ways, but he was
a man. There was sadness in being a man, but it
was a proud thing too. And he showed what the
pride of it was till you couldn’t help feeling it.
Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you’d
know it. And he wasn’t pleading for any one
person any more, though his voice rang like an
organ. He was telling the story and the failures
and the endless journey of mankind. They got
tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was
a great journey. And no demon that was ever
foaled could know the inwardness of it-it took
a man to do that.

 THE FIRE BEGAN TO DIE ON THE HEARTH AND THE
wind before morning to blow. The light was
getting gray in the room when Dan’l Webster
finished. And his words came back at the end
to New Hampshire ground, and the one spot of
land that each man loves and clings to. He
painted a picture of that, and to each one of that
jury he spoke of things long forgotten. For his
voice could search the heart, and that was his
gift and his strength. And to one, his voice was
like the forest and its secrecy, and to another
like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one
heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another

saw a little harmless scene he hadn’t remem-
bered for years. But each saw something. And
when Dan’l Webster finished he didn’t know
whether or not he’d saved Jabez Stone. But he
knew he’d done a miracle. For the glitter was
gone from the eyes of judge and jury, and, for
the moment, they were men again, and knew
they were men.

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Don the Kiwi
Monday, February 23, AD 2009 12:10pm

“……….I treasured in my mispent nocturnal youth.”

So you had one of those too, huh?

bobby booshay
bobby booshay
Tuesday, February 24, AD 2009 1:22am

it would have been better if it ended with a bunch of static noise and snowy screen…..

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