I'm reading Pound's wartime radio speeches, and must relate a recent
experience.
 
In the speech for 26 March 1942 Pound writes:
 
".... Can't go back before Gettysburg, the very names are forgotten now.
Names we, the men of my time, grew up on, but we WERE being taught to
forget. Or rather the WHOLE of the history was aimed at FORGETTING. It was
top dressing, a monotony of military encounters, done with music and
banners, to KEEP the nation's mind OFF the causes--off the REAL causes.
Debts of the Southern states, to the bankers of New York City."
 
Well, I was recently in Gettysburg and visited the National Park. As you
approach the tower, from which you can look out upon the cemetery and the
battle fields, a triumphant J.P. Sousa march is BLARING from the loud
speakers stuck up in the trees lining the footpath. Then you pay your money
and enter the tower. When you get to the top of that high tower, the Sousa
march is no longer audible and a different piped-in music strikes your
ears-- a smooth and bubbly piece fit for the orchestra of the swankest of
nightclubs, a number Fred Astair might have swirled Ginger Rogers across the
floor by, in a 30's film musical.
 
Since Pound mentions Gettysburg and forgetting in the same breath, here's an
excerpt from Lincoln's address:
 
"....The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it
can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus
far so nobly advanced
..... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and
that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from this earth."
 
Tim Romano