Songs

Songs of Freedom:

I was listening to some old songs tonight. Songs like this one:

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
With an eye like an eagle
And as tall as a mountain was he!

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
He was brave, he was fearless
And as tough as a mighty oak tree!

From the coonskin cap on the top of ol' Dan
To the heel of his rawhide shoe;
The rippin'est, roarin'est, fightin'est man
The frontier ever knew!

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all Americans free!

Here's another, so you can see where I'm going with this:

I'll tell you a story
A real true life story
A tale of the Western frontier

The West it was lawless
But one man was flawless
And his is the story you'll hear.

Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, brave courageous and bold.
Long live his fame and long live his glory
And long may his story be told.

If you've never heard the above song, you should. It's sung in a form that exists nowhere else, except in a church hymnal.

Just one more, since we were talking about the Alamo:

Fought single handed through the Injun war,
Till the Creeks was whipped and peace was restored.
And while he was handling this risky chore,
Made himself a legend, forevermore.

Davy, Davy Crockett the man who don't know fear.

He went of to Congress and served a spell
Fixin' up the government and laws as well.
Took over Washington, I heard tell,
And patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell.

What do these songs have in common? Three things: they treat the American frontier; they portray the lives of their characters in over-the-top idealism; and they do so without a hint of irony.

We usually see this kind of idealism only in children. Watching children play, you'll see that their toy guns never miss -- and the guns of the imagined enemy always do. They're always faster, cleverer, and in the right.

Yet the audience for these songs, and the television shows or movies that went with them, was not children. They were grown men, and not just any men. They were the adult men of the 1950s and 1960s, who had been the young men and older teenagers in the days of World War II. These were, as Reagan said, the boys of Point du Hoc.

So many today look back on the culture of the 1950s with smugness, as if our generations were so much more clever, so much more insightful than they. How blind they were, how childlike their ideas! Yet they had seen terror and fire close at hand.

I submit that -- maybe -- if they believed in these things, it's because these are things worth believing in.