LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dabroots)

I posted this very old poem by Carl Sandburg in this community, yesterday, but later noticed that it had been deleted by sunfell's co-mod with the e-mailed note, "Not Appropriate." Okay . . . well, here you go, again, with sunfell's blessing. Bear in mind that my reason for posting this poem is not to "attack" our current President but instead to point out that GWB is not the first U.S. President who has wrapped himself in the Shroud of Turin to get more votes. The World War One era and the early 1920's are, in a way, more complicated when considering the political puffing of Christ's corpse, in that some figures, such as William Jennings Bryan, had opposed America's entry into the First World War but were also Protestant fundamentalists. As far as copyright issues, this poem was written and originally published in the early 1920's. I might be wrong, but I believe its copyright has lapsed.

God's Children

I hear Billy Sunday
And the Kaiser and Czar
Talking about God
Like God was some pal of theirs,
Like the rest of us was in the cold outside,
Like they had been drinking beer with God,
Like as though they know whether God
Calls for a short beer or a gin fizz
Or whether God sleeps in a Y.M.C.A. dormitory
And never goes near a booze bazaar.

When I listen to Billy Sunday
Holler out loud
How God "hates a quitter,"
How God "hates a mutt,"
I can't help it---I feel just like God was some cheap dirty thing
born from a fiddler's bitch and kicked from one back door
to another.