Resonating Questions

At first I found “next to of course god america i” hard to understand. It seemed a jumbled mess of common nationalistic dialog. He quotes “The Star Spangled Banner” and other political songs and phrases. It required some reading and rereading to realize that that was the point. Cumming’s character – a political or religious leader of some sort making a speech – says the things that we as American citizens have all heard before: politicians playing off of our national pride to put themselves in office. I felt as though Cummings was suggesting that people should not necessarily believe everything that they hear, that, in fact, they should second-guess everything and draw their own conclusions.

The part that is most interesting to me, however, is the segment that talks about our troops (lines 9-13). Here, Cumming’s tone becomes sarcastic in a sense. It’s almost as if he is mocking these politicians for exploiting our troops for their personal gain by being “supportive” of them. This segment also made me (and I believe this is the point) question my beliefs about the conditioning of our troops. Should they really “rush like lions to the roaring slaughter… [without] stop[ping] to think”? Should they do exactly what they are told without thinking about the effects of simply following orders? And by us speaking of them in the way that Cummings’s character does, do we support such actions? I don’t necessarily know the right answers to those questions but I appreciate the fact that Cummings is asking his readers to face those questions. Again, I felt as though he was asking them to draw their own conclusions.

That is another thing I appreciate about this poem: its themes continue to resonate today. The poem was originally published in 1926, just after the conclusion of World War II. (There are a few moments in the poem, in fact, that reflect the time in which it was written. For example, I read that the syntax in line 11 is supposedly meant to reflect the “inverted thinking” of the time.) However with the United States in the middle of two wars, these are issues that we need to think about and address.