President Bush will give his State of the Union speech tonight to Congress in the House Chamber up on Capital Hill. Every time I hear the term "State of the Union" the spoken lines from the play "The Devil and Daniel Webster" by Stephen Vincent Benet rings in my mind that I first heard on a record ( yes, a record) when I was in grade school many yeas ago. It went like this:
"It's a Story they tell in the border country, where Massachusetts joins Vermont and New Hampshire. Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead--or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, "Dan'l Webster--Dan'l Webster!" the ground'll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake. And after a while you'll hear a deep voice saying, "Neighbor, how stands the Union?" Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible, or he's liable to rear right out of the ground. At least, that's what I was told when I was a youngster"
So George W Bush..... how stands the Union?
