“American Pie”: Our Great Lament

There’s a decent chance, when you hear “a long, long time ago,” that everyone will sing the intro perfectly and mumble the rest, I being one of them until my friends played it a good deal of times in a short period of time. Now I have been told that it is nigh on sin to turn it off at any point during the song, so I ended up listening to the whole of the lyrics enough times to develop a true appreciation for what Don McLean is getting at. The song, of course, is a sort of allegorical summary of rock, but it seems to me that this is only a means by which it explains its main point—viz. that Christian America is no more.

The song was written in 1971, just after the main brunt of the sexual revolution which was our culture’s great suicide; the origin of most of the modern day’s evils. Don McLean had grown up in the 1950s, an age which, though troubled, is still known for its purity and innocence, an age where the good old American spirit was still alive and well.

Now the good old American spirit is something that few alive now remember, the vestiges of which are not even of such a magnitude and number as to comprise a region, but are found only in certain families scattered around the nation like gold flakes in a river.

True, America was not the overly commercialistic, technocratic, political hellscape of today, where half the families are split and most of the rest feature chasmic differences between the parents and children, but an age of church-going folk who loved their parents, knew their neighbors, married young and stayed married, raised many kids, worked hard at work so that they could come home to their families and be with their families, sang the National Anthem at baseball games with their hands on their hearts, and died in the homes of their children, surrounded by two generations of their self-same blood.

Where have we gone? Here is such a soul-wrenching sadness that it can only be truly explained in tears or in song. It is like how the Massacre of the Innocents is only truly captured in the Coventry Carol, the destruction of Israel in the Book of Lamentations, the fall of the Queen City of the Christianity in the Lament for Constantinople.

A tragedy this great must be diabolical, as Don McLean wisely observes. The jester has indeed stolen the thorny crown from the head of our king. Our nation has forgotten God and turned to a religion of tolerance of evil, self-satisfaction, and indifference. It seems to me that Satan very likely laughs into the night, seeing so great a country as America turn to such great evil.

So there is great loss, and I have found this loss expressed nowhere so well as in this song, but there is also a good deal of hope. Just as the Coventry Carol is not worth singing unless it galvanizes us to protect the unborn today, so singing American Pie is a waste of breath unless we’re willing to take steps to return America to the loving hands of Jesus. You, dear reader, may be the one to rise the ranks of politics and enact laws to change the culture. You may, but it’s much more likely that the crucial role you will play in this great war of our age will be for you to raise your children well. Pray the Rosary with them each night for the protection of your family and the redemption of our homeland. Go to Mass even though your children are loud and disruptive. Take a job that you know will give you time at home so that your daughters will know what a real man looks like and every son will become one. Love the flag and the ground it stands in. After all, just like Rome, we never loved this land because it was great, but this land, this holy land of ours, was great because we loved it.