Mari Ness - Snow Patrol grammar

So over the last few days I've had a surprising number of conversations about the correct usage of "lie" versus "lay," this surprising because this is usually not the sort of thing I want to talk about since I can never remember the damn rules for them myself. (When I taught English as a second language, I resorted to the cheap trick of telling my students to just never, ever, lay anything down anyplace -- just put it down someplace, which had the additional advantage that they didn't even have to worry if they were putting said item down in the past or present or how to spell the damned past participle. Also, this eliminates all confusion between "set" and "sit." Put: your solution to English grammar issues everywhere. I love that word. But I digress.)

As it turns out, the confusion is not limited to ESL teachers and their students, as demonstrated by a little song by Snow Patrol called "Chasing Cars," which includes the following bit:

If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world..."*

Beautiful.

Now, some of you, hearing this song, undoubtedly took it as a song demanding a retreat from reality; a plea to to forget the world; a plea to bring some grace and meaning into the world; a cry against the fear of aging and death; a desire to tell the world to go fuck itself while we run around chasing cars; a song of angst and emo and hatred and all that. This is all true, but I think you are all missing the deeper meaning here. No, this a song about the agony of choosing between "lay" and "lie"; about how the agony of having to make the choice, of having to trying to remember the damn difference, of trying to remember those hideous grammar exercises your cruel English teachers made you write out over and over and over will actually destroy your mind, to the point where the only solution is to either hide under the blankets or alternatively run around wildly chasing cars, with the second alternative at least burning off calories. I find it a powerful indictment against the role of grammar in our society, and I highly approve the song.

* Yes, in the first chorus, it sounds distinctly as if Gary Lightbody might be singing "If I lie here," but he corrects this punctuation later, so we're going with the second and repeated punctuation.

For the grammar geeks, the second use is correct, the first incorrect: you have to lay down things; if you're just flopping around, you lie around, sort of, unless you're a cat, in which case you curl up into a small ball or wiggle frantically on a person to find the absolute most comfy spot and point out that all of that time spent worrying about grammar could more profitably be spent either in little cat dreams or, better yet, in procuring tuna fish for small cats.

(But wait, I hear you telling me. Isn't "If I lay here" in the subjunctive mood? And doesn't the subjunctive do something screwy to verb tenses? Well, yes, if -- and only if -- we are talking about two different situations: the third person singular [which is not the case here], or in cases where the first person singular is followed by a form of the verb "to be" ["If I were a tree, I would not be wasting time writing silly posts about lying and laying around thinking about the damn uses of the subjunctive but would instead be focusing on wondering why, precisely, my bark seems to attracting a certain sort of bird, and what I can do about what that bird is doing to my bark."] again, not the case here.)

Edit to footnote: Much thanks to S for pointing out that after all that, I messed up my parenthetical punctuation. Heh. Corrected now. I blame the general events of the day.