GLORIOUS ANTHEM
Fake outrage over the ‘unknown’ stanza
‘The Star-Spangled Banner” is notoriously difficult to sing, but when it’s done right, chills. Check out Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl or (my favorite) Marvin Gaye at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game.
“I’ve never been part of an anthem where everybody’s just in unison and lost control and just started moving. It was a beautiful moment,” superstar hoops player Isiah Thomas recalled later.
We have the song to thank for the dear position held in our collective consciousness by the words “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
As with just about everything else in America, though — Statues! Old movies! Math! — our national anthem stands endangered by the woke mob. What the British couldn’t do to Old Glory in the perilous night, grievancemongers are trying to do by claiming to be offended by words no one has even heard.
The hammer- and flame-throwing athlete Gwen Berry, who is trying to ride public contempt for American symbols to the top of the fame pyramid without the intervening step of actually being famous for sporting achievements, now says the reason she turned her back on the anthem at the medal ceremony is because of the third verse.
The... third verse? The one that wasn’t played at the track-and-field trial anyway? The one no one ever sings? The one I’ve never heard in my entire life?
Yeah, she’s upset about that one. The part of the anthem that has effectively been cut out of the song is the reason she can’t abide any part of it.
Historians say the third verse, with its reference to “the hireling and the slave,” is meant to disparage the victims of enslavement, and Francis Scott Key himself owned slaves at the time he wrote the song in 1814.
But this is all just trivia if no one is actually singing the verse anymore, and they aren’t. Nobody even sings the second verse (“On the shore, dimly seen, through the mists of the deep . . .”). The third verse is a dead letter.
It’s like opposing the US Constitution because it used to fail to guarantee voting rights for women, or indeed hating the United States because it used to accept slavery.
Leftist activists have gone so wacky that they now sound like Hal Philip Walker, the nutty populist presidential candidate Robert Altman lampooned in his classic 1975 political movie, “Nashville.” Walker, an unseen presence broadcasting out of a van, catches on with the dummies on a platform of opposing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on grounds that it is too elitist. (“Consider our national anthem. Nobody knows the words. Nobody can sing it. Nobody understands it. I suppose all the lawyers supported it . . . Change our national anthem to something people understand.”) United by a presumption that all of the institutions are rotten, some strange coalitions of left and right emerge.
We’ll all be better off if we take an occasional break from being outraged, or fake-outraged. As sung today, “The Star-Spangled Banner” doesn’t celebrate slavery or even refer to it. We kept the parts that work and cut out the rest. That’s a pretty good encapsulation of the American experiment, which began as the only democracy in the world and then got better and better over time. There’s no harm in acknowledging everything we got wrong along the way, but the Gwen Berrys seem oblivious to all the stuff we got right.