The Most Boring, Stupid, and Heterosexist State Songs

At every school assembly when I was a kid in Rock Island, we had to sing the state song.  You were also forced to sing it at football games, wrestling matches, and political rallies:

By thy rivers gently flowing, Illinois, Illinois,
O'er the prairies verdant growing, Illinois, Illinois,
Comes an echo on the breeze.
Rustling through the leafy trees, and its mellow tones are these, Illinois, Illinois.

Has any state song been more reviled and made fun of?

Yep.  Across the river, Iowa's state song is just as bad, if not worse:

From yonder Misissippi's stream
To where Missouri's waters gleam
O! fair it is as poet's dream, Iowa, in Iowa.


Who decided that states should have official songs to be foisted upon schoolchildren and the audiences of football teams, and who decided that they should be uniformly so awful?  And heterosexist?

I took it upon myself to read the lyrics of all 50+ state songs (some have more than one).

It was dismal.  Song after song of nonsense.

This state is full of badgers, this state is full of sod,
This state is full of sandwiches, this state is under God.

New York's is hands-down the stupidest:

New York is special. New York is diff'rent' cause there's no place else on Earth quite like New York and that's why I love New York.

What, "Start spreading the word, I'm leaving today" was taken?

Contrary to what you might think, it was not composed by a 5-year old, but by Steve Karmen, an accomplished tv commercial jingle writer: "Aren't you glad you use Dial?", "When you say Budweiser," "The Great American chocolate bar."

Maryland's state song is grotesquely bloody:

Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore, Maryland! My Maryland!

Colorado's is all about mass extinction due to global warming:

The bison is gone from the upland, the deer from the canyon has fled,
The home of the wolf is deserted, the antelope moans for his dead

Fortunately, they replaced it with John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" in 2007.







And over half are disgustingly heterosexist, making schoolkids and football teams sing about "Aren't you glad everybody is heterosexual?  Aren't you glad those pesky gay people don't exist?"

 How many times have you heard Indiana's "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away," without knowing who ir what was on that riverbank?  Some guy's dead girlfriend:

Long years have passed since I strolled thro' the churchyard.
She's sleeping there, my angel, Mary dear,
I loved her, but she thought I didn't mean it,
Still I'd give my future were she only here.

Georgia has Ray Charles' "Georgia On My Mind," in which the guy thinks of his ex-girlfriend while he's in bed with other women.

Other arms reach out to me, other eyes smile tenderly
Still in the peaceful dreams I see the road leads back to you

By the way, when you google "Georgia football player shirtless," what you get is Darian Alvarez, a soccer player from Honduras.  Not that I'm complaining.

Before countering with "South Carolina On My Mind" in 1984, South Carolina's state song was a little more graphic about the guy's girlfriend getting with other guys..

Thy skirts indeed the foe may part,
Thy robe be pierced with sword and dart,
They shall not touch thy noble heart!

After that, Michigan's state song about lost love is sort of a relief.  The girlfriend is receding into the distance, while the guy moans  "What am I supposed to do without you?"

Tennessee has "The Tennessee Waltz," which we had to sing in grade-school music class; "I was dancing with my darling, etc., etc."  Missouri has "The Missouri Waltz," which has a whole complicated story about a father reminiscing to his children about his wife or ex-wife or something.

Oklahoma adopted "Oklahoma," from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which is all about getting married and moving to the land stolen from the Indians:

Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk makin' lazy circles in the sky

Um...you know that hawk is searching for small animals to kill and eat, right?

Utah's state song is all about Brigham Young, Family with a capital F, and the "No Child Left Behind" Act.

Utah! With its focus on family,
Utah! Helps each child to succeed.
People care how they live.
Each has so much to give.
This is the place!

I just wish these guys were from Mississippi, so there'd be ten of them.

No state song extolled same-sex friendship, and the only one with any beefcake was Alabama's, mentioning two Native American heroes with muscular physiques:

Fair thy Coosa-Tallapoosa
Bold thy Warrior, dark and strong,
Alabama, Alabama, we will aye be true to thee!

Whoops, my mistake.  Those are both rivers.

Still, I imagine that grade school kids in Alabama have a lot of fun thinking of dirty meanings to Coosa-Tallapoosa.

"Hereditary": A Gay Demon and his Boy Host

It was so easy to find gay subtexts in the gay free Midsommar that I thought I'd check out diretor Ari Aster's other movies.  Other than some film-school shorts, he just has one, Hereditary (2018).

Piece of cake.

Surly, depressed 16-year old Peter (Alex Wolff, who you may remember from The Naked Brothers Band on Nickelodeon) lives in rural Utah with his crazy artist Mom and wimpy Dad.  Mom forces him to take his little sister Charlie, who clicks her tongue and stares at fires, to a high school party.  While he mingles, smoking pot and talking to boys, she eats a piece of cake with nuts in it and has an allergic reaction.

Peter tries to rush her to the hospital, but while he is driving down the dark country roads, he swerves to avoid a deer and slams into a telephone pole, decapitating her.

Mom Annie (Toni Collette) didn't like Peter much to begin with, and now the gloves come off.  She tortures him by building a miniature of the accident, coming into his room at night and asking if Charlie is there, and forcing him into a seance to contact Charlie, who doesn't realize that she's dead.  In another weird scene, she climbs into bed with him, attempting a seduction.

Meanwhile Charlie comes back as a malevolent ghost, throwing things around and trying to set them on fire.

Dad (Gabriel Byrne) tries to keep the family together, lashing out at Annie for torturing their son (and trying to seduce him), but in the end he is ineffective and gets burnt to death in one of the dead Charlie's rampages.

Peter spends most of the movie hanging out in the same grey t-shirt, being morose and guilt-ridden, receiving hand-on-shoulder support from his buds, and crying in history class.  The wikipedia page lists a Bridget a "love interest," but the scenes where they fall in love must have been deleted.   Peter only interacts with boys.  He never discusses girls or looks at a girl twice. He is obviously gay. 

Eventually we discover that Annie's dead mom, Ellen, belonged to a cult devoted to the demon Paimon.  He's been trying to break through to our world, but he hasn't yet found a suitable human host.  He goes down the hereditary blood line and inhabits someone for awhile, but eventually they aren't good enough, and he decapitates them and moves on.  Ellen, Charlie, Annie's friend Joan, and then Annie himself.

Well, these have all been female hosts.  Maybe Paimon prefers men?

A buffed, naked man appears in Peter's closet (hang on -- I'm checking to see if there's a naked man in my closet) -- and leads him to the attic.  More homoerotic subtext: same-sex desire leads Peter to his destiny.

There he finds the decapitated heads of his family, plus Grandma Ellen's cult members  (all naked, penises and everything showing).  They crown him king.  I was right: women were ok temporarily, but for a permanent host, Paimon prefers men.

Sure, that's understandable.  Lots of gay men don't mind socializing with women, but when the lights go down and everyone gets naked, they want to be inside the body of a man. 

See also: Midsommar.

The Beefcake of Mormon Central

You may think that Salt Lake City, headquarters of the LDS Church, is Mormon Central, but actually it's  50% Gentile.  To get to real Mormon country, where alcohol and coffee are as rare as Methodist Churches, where, everyone is into genealogy (so they can convert their ancestors), and where almost all young men spend two years after high school as missionaries (with or without their shirts), you have to hhead south to Utah Lake.  The west side is all mountains, but the east side is cluttered with Mormon towns.

1. Lehi sounds like a character from the Book of Mormon,but it's actually a place in Judea where Samson slew some Philistines with a donkey's jawbone.  Its main tourist attraction is Thanksgiving Point, a museum-recreation complex with a golf course, a working farm, and the Museum of Ancient Life (which displays fossils but says nothing about evolution).

There are two high schools, Lehi and Skyridge.

2. The ritzy suburb of Highland increased its population by 2000% between 1970 and 1980.  Its high school is called Lone Peak.

3. American Fork  was the site of the first Mormon settlement in Utah, before they got to Salt Lake City. It's the site of Timpanagos Cave National Monument, which is not nearly as extensive as Mammoth Caves in Kentucky.

The American Fork team is called the Cavemen.

4. What can you say about a town named Pleasant Grove?  There are twelve LDS wards and a fundamentalist church called the Truth of God.  Followers must feel severely outnumbered.  There's also a restaurant called the Holy Grill.

So you can invite a Pleasant Grove Viking to a service at the Truth of God, followed by a burger at the Holy Grill. That's quite an unusual date.

5. Orem is named after railroad magnate Wallace C. Orem.  It's nicknamed "Family City USA" because of all the Mormons, who are into having lots of kids.  The median age is 24, about 10 years younger than the U.S. in general, which I suppose is good if you're into Mormon twinks.

It has a bar called the Hitching Post for Mormons to get their alcohol on.

Three high schools and Utah Valley College. 

Orem is 0.9% black.  Where did they find a black guy for the swim team?

I like Timpanagos High.  Clever how they take the initials THS and build them into the word "Toughness."

6. Provo, 112,000 people, almost all Mormon or ex-Mormon, the home of BrighamYoung University, which draws 33,000 students from all over the world.  Where else would Mormon youth want to study?  Unless you are gay, of course.  Gay people are verboten throughout Mormon country.

I couldn't find any beefcake photos of BYU athletes, except for this old one of a bulgeworthy wrestling team of yesteryear.

And this one of the tennis club on a shirtless hike.  I had to block out the kids.  There are always little kids in Mormon photos.