Jumping Out of Ordinary Time: Sacred Rhetoric in American Political Discourse.

After the attack on the World Trade Center, a struggle immediately began over how to characterize that event. Was it an act of war or a crime? Those who wanted to contain the event within the framework of ordinary politics, to be handled by properly designated officials within pre-existing procedures and language, said the act was a crime, the perpetrators were criminals, and those who aided the criminals should be apprehended and tried in a court of justice. The resulting punishment would complete the event and everything would proceed within ordinary, diachronic, time. The lyrics of God Bless America that spontaneously sounded throughout the country drowned out the discourse of crime. War became the defining word. The country began to speak in a different voice and entered a different mode of time ? a synchronic time in which past, present, and future become mixed up, reversed, and conflated. That song was in fact a late and generic coda to a host of patriotic hymns written by Unionists in the massively disruptive period of the American Civil War. The most famous is Battle Hymn of the Republic (technically, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory) whose verses track the path of the nation through the apocalyptic Book of Revelation in the Bible: ?He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; / He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat.? Equally famous is another hymn of that era, My Country, Tis of Thee. It begins with the Puritan nation founders and ends: ?Our father?s God, to thee, / Author of liberty, / To thee we sing; / Long may our land be bright / With freedom?s holy light; / Protect us by thy might, / Great God, our King.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]