Thread: un-singable, un-american...perfect

Unsingable, un-American -- perfect
July 4, 2006

BY MARY WISNIEWSKI




Every year around this time, someone picks on "The Star-Spangled Banner." Not the flag, which despite the anxiety of some senators is in little danger of abuse. It's the song that gets the mud.

Music critics bash it for being unsingable -- with a range of an octave and a half that poses a challenge even to professionals. Editorial writers disdain its lowly origins as an English drinking song.

After 9/11, the American Coalition for a New National Anthem advocated Irving Berlin's four-square "God Bless America" as a replacement. Media mogul Ted Turner has called for a less warlike anthem, and proposed "America the Beautiful."

Though President Bush saved his criticism for the Spanish version, the English "Banner" is regularly abused by U.S. citizens who don't know the words, and don't even try to sing them.

Granted, "America the Beautiful" is a great song. So is "This Land is Your Land" or any number of crowd-pleasers that are homegrown and easy to sing.

But the anthem should stay "The Star-Spangled Banner," precisely because of its faults. It used to be British, and it's hard to sing. And that makes it just like America.

It's always been tough to be the United States. It's tough being a democracy, especially when you've got 3.5 million square miles, filled with nearly every religion and culture in the world.

It's easier being a dictatorship, because then nobody can question anything. Here we're always wrangling. It's so unpleasant. What are my rights? What are his rights? What if his rights threaten mine?

We're always trying for more than we can deliver in America. Like reaching for that high "free" in the anthem, we rarely get there without a compromise, a squeak or a mistake.

The revolution was initially supported by a minority of colonists. When Britain surrendered, Americans couldn't agree on what to do next. It took a lot of compromise to get to the Constitution.

The compromises included the accommodation of slavery, a crime that has poisoned the country to this day. Our forefathers also allowed the Western expansion that decimated native cultures.

A review of American history shows one crisis after another. The War of 1812, which included the battle that inspired Francis Scott Key's words, ended in stalemate and depleted the treasury.

Then there was the Civil War, which took 600,000 lives and ended slavery, to be followed by new forms of racial injustice.

We've had many triumphs. We made jazz and medicine, airplanes and spaceships, and a whole lot of money. We helped stop tyranny in World War II. We created a dream that's gone around the world -- so millions want to come here to do what they can't do in their own countries.

But it's never perfect. We're always fighting each other, calling each other "traitor" or "fascist," trying to work out the best way to teach our children, distribute our wealth and protect our lands from other nations and from ourselves. Democracy demands a struggle, and democracy is what we must have.

The "Star-Spangled Banner" has four verses, but we only ever sing the first one. That verse ends with a question mark. "O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

We're always asking that question in America. Is our flag still there? We asked it when the South seceded, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and when the plane went into the Pentagon. We asked it when Joseph McCarthy was finding imaginary communists, and Birmingham cops were turning fire hoses on peaceful marchers. And we're going to keep asking it. Is our flag still there?

Because we're always being threatened, from within or without. Somewhere, Fort McHenry is always under siege. Because the struggle for democracy and justice in this country that promises so much never ends.

That's why the anthem moves us. Because when we sing it, when we reach for the "free," we can feel the 230-year struggle in our throats.


Mary Wisniewski is a Sun-Times business reporter.

Yeh, leave my anthem alone!!!!
It's challenging, just like us!

Got that right!

No way should our anthem ever be changed. I get goosebumps and choked up every time I hear it, without fail.

have you not noticed, they want to do away with EVERYTHING that means anything to us? CONTROL

Does the UN have an anthem? Maybe they'll suggest we adopt theirs if there is one.

Proud to be an American ... pain in the butt!