When it comes to patriotic pop songs, I have long preferred Neil Diamond’s America, to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA. Diamond’s immigrant anthem is simply deeper and better captures so much that I do love about this country, while Greenwood’s song just comes across as overused to the point of being jingoistic. Maybe it is also because Diamond has a far broader and deeper artistic career,* and Greenwood seems to have become God Bless the USA as a business proposition (let’s not forget that the Trump Bible started out as a Greenwood product).
I recently came across America on YouTube, and it depresses me because the pure hope, optimism, and promise of the song are currently tainted by the Trump administration’s approach to immigrants.
Free
Only want to be free
We huddle close
Hang on to a dream
On the boats and on the planes
They’re coming to America
Never looking back again
They’re coming to America[…]
Every time that flag’s unfurled
They’re coming to America
Got a dream to take them there
They’re coming to America
Got a dream they’ve come to share
They’re coming to America
Those lyrics just don’t feel real at the moment.
For example, via ABC News, Russian researcher at Harvard being held after failing to declare frog embryos at customs.
A Russian researcher at Harvard University is being detained at a Louisiana detention center over failing to declare frog embryos while passing through customs, according to a complaint filed by her attorney.
Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard medical researcher who is in the U.S. on an exchange visitor visa, was detained last month at an airport in Boston after a Customs and Border Protection officer found “noninfectious and non-toxic frog embryos in her luggage,” the complaint said.
[…]
According to the complaint, Petrova told the CBP officer that she feared being returned to Russia, where she faced past persecution for her political activities, and instead requested to be returned to France — at which point she was detained.
Got a dream to take them there? They’ll detain you in America.
Based on other accounts that I have read, she was confused about the rules and that the fine for what she did would be $500. I am not saying she should not have been fined. I am saying that sending her to a detention center in Louisiana while facing deportation to Russia is the stuff of totalitarian police states, not of a place where, when the flag is unfurled, dreamers are drawn to your shores.
Or, there’s this: German tourist with US visa reflects on being held in ICE custody for weeks.
U.S. border agents handcuffed Tyler, a U.S. citizen who lives in Las Vegas, and chained her to a bench, while her fiancé was accused of violating the rules of his 90-day U.S. tourist permit, the couple said. Authorities later handcuffed and shackled Sielaff and sent him to a crowded U.S. immigration detention center. He spent 16 days locked up before being allowed to fly home to Germany.
“It was horrible. You are just innocent and want to go to America and then they put you in jail and they asking you questions and you don’t even know what to say,” Sielaff told NBC 7 from his home in Germany.
Sielaff was allowed into the United States under a waiver program offered to a select group of countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, whose citizens are allowed to travel to the U.S. for business or leisure for up to 90 days without getting a visa in advance. Applicants register online with the Electronic System for Travel Authorization.
[…]
After four hours, Tyler was allowed to leave but said she was given no information about her fiancé’s whereabouts.
During questioning, Sielaff said he told authorities he never lived in the U.S. and had no criminal history. He said he was given a full-body search and ordered to hand over his cellphone and belongings. He was put in a holding cell where he slept on a bench for two days before being transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
There, he said, he shared a cell with eight others.
“You are angry, you are sad, you don’t know when you can get out,” Sielaff said. “You just don’t get any answers from anybody.”
He was finally told to get a direct flight to Germany and submit a confirmation number. In a frantic call from Sielaff, Tyler bought it for $2,744. He flew back March 5.
If I understand the timeline properly, he was in custody from February 18th until March 5th.
For going to Tijuana.
A new and a shiny place, indeed!
To drop the snark and to set aside any analytical point or complex language, this all simply makes me sad. Listening to the song hurts my heart because Trump and his allies and supporters are taking away something very special about the United States of America. He is sullying our national symbols and changing the way the world looks at us.
Freedom’s light is not burning warm.
It is a tragedy.
At any rate, for whatever reason, I cannot get the YouTube video to embed, so if you want to hear and see America, go here.
*I saw Diamond live in Los Angeles at the Forum over thirty years ago. We had been given tickets as he was not someone I would have simply pursued seeing, but it was a truly remarkable show. The funny thing is that he seemed old at the time! We won’t get into the fact that he was younger than I am right now.,
