David Shapiro: Whistling in the darkness of a world driven by antipathy

My head these days is full of a song from my young folkie days called “The Merry Minuet,” written by Broadway composer Sheldon Harnick and recorded by the Kingston Trio in the late 1950s.

The song, which you can find on YouTube, is sung in a cheerful air with happy whistling right out of Mayberry, USA. The first verse goes:

They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain;

There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain;

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls;

The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles;

Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch;

And I don’t like anybody very much.

It fascinates that lines from a topical song written 65 years ago could have come out of today’s news.

And it gets to the root of so many of our problems, the dark trait that’s haunted humankind throughout our history: We really don’t like each other very much.

Back in the ’50s, though, the strife was seen as being elsewhere — Africa, Northern Ireland, the Middle East — not at home.

We were America, an exceptional nation of immigrants that could overcome differences, achieve greatness never seen before and chuckle at the foibles of others.

We now see such national confidence was mostly illusion. We disliked each other as much as anybody else, but for a time were able to slap a veil of civility over it, a thin membrane easily ripped open as self-interest produced raging conflicts that couldn’t be easily resolved or papered over.

Now what was once seen as the great American experiment has devolved into a broken dream that has made our country an epicenter of global instability.

America has become a world leader when it comes to disliking one another. We’re angrily divided by race, region, gender, religion, age, education and politics.

Those on opposite sides of the many divides foolishly paint ourselves into corners and fight with such fierce hatred that common cause on even the simplest of challenges seems hopeless.

The rest of the world follows suit, and the final verse of our merry minuet can’t help but hit home as the news fills with natural catastrophes and more talk of nuclear Armageddon than any time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis:

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud;

For man’s been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud;

And we know for certain that some lucky day;

Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away;

They’re rioting in Africa, there’s strife in Iran;

What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man

On good days this song still makes me smile as I harbor hope that somehow, long after I’m gone, our country and world will figure it out and the tune will remain something that can make people chuckle.

On other days I hum it like a mournful blues and can’t imagine it once made me want to whistle.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.