"sail on, sail on, o mighty ship of state"

You can watch cable news tonight and obsess over all the minutiae of yesterday's midterm election and its predictable Republican gains, or you can keep these swings in perspective by listening to the song from Montreal's favorite anglophone son up above, or reading this poem from 1850 down below, which probably had at least a little bit of influence on the chorus in Leonard Cohen's "Democracy."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“The Republic” from “The Building of the Ship”
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1850)


Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
’T is of the wave and not the rock;
’T is but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,
Are all with thee,—are all with thee!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The 2014 Platform of Texas's Grand Ole Party -- The Comic Wingnut Gift That Keeps on Giving

As in 2012, the 2014 State Republican Party Platform of Texas continues to be a platform that calls for US withdrawal from the UN, World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization, an end to the Department of Energy and the ban on incandescent light bulbs, an Israel policy inspired by "God's biblical promise" and our "God-given right" to carry a firearm, an end to Social Security and the Environmental Protection Agency and more. Read it all if you want to see how far this supposedly mainstream political party has left the banks of the stream altogether. It also contains the headline-grabbing section about reparative therapy for gays because (of course) "Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible..."

But tonight I want to concentrate on the section on "HONORING THE SYMBOLS OF OUR AMERICAN HERITAGE" in which flag desecration (against it) and the Confederate Widow's Plaque (for it) are addressed and there is this more open-ended  section:

Symbols of American Heritage - We call upon governmental entities to protect all symbols of our American heritage from being altered in any way. 

Does that include protection of the Yellow Snake Teabag Cop-Killer Flag from alteration?

How about that battle flag flown by traitors defending slavery during the 1860s?

"We are not prone to surrender, we Mississippians." --Chris McDaniel

But who would expect a teabagger to have any sense of history, or irony?