O SAY CAN YOU SEE (AND HEAR) THIS SONG IS LOUSY?

I hope this doesn’t sound unpatriotic, because I truly love my country, but I do not like our national anthem. No, not one bit. “The Star Spangled Banner” is simply a lousy song.

Here in the middle of the Vancouver Winter Olympics I hope we hear the song a lot, but every time I hear our national anthem, I think to myself, “Oh America, America, with so many talented songwriters, that’s the best you can do?”

By the way, I can remember a time when the Winter Olympic organizers didn’t even bring a recording of “The Star Spangled Banner” to the games, such was the ineptitude of American athletes on snow and ice. But since women’s figure skating became popular, and especially since they’ve added a bunch of new sports that allow skateboarding slackers to do airborne tricks in the snow, the U.S. now can be counted on to win a handful of gold medals.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” has one positive point: it is our national anthem. So whenever we hear the song, it signifies something important. For instance, it means we just won a gold medal, or a ballgame is about to start, or it’s 5:30 a.m. and the local news-talk radio show is signing on and I’m going to be late for work if I don’t get out of bed RIGHT NOW. But that’s about it. There’s nothing else good about the song.

On the other hand, “The Star-Spangled Banner” has countless negative points:

• It’s almost impossible to sing, since it has a range of one-and-a-half octaves.
   
• No one knows what it actually means. Be honest, what percentage of Americans know the lyrics are based on the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812, when British ships bombarded Ft. McHenry in Chesapeake Bay, and a 35-year-old amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, was impressed that the American flag was still visible thru all the explosions and smoke? (Well, anyway, that’s what Wikipedia said.)
   
• It uses the contraction “o’er” (short for “over”), and most people screw it up by singing, “for the land of the free,” when it should be “o’er the land of the free.”
   
• It ends with a question mark. What other national anthem concludes in such confusion? More importantly, who even knows it ends in a question?
   
• The tune is from an old English drinking song, which makes sense, because who in their right mind would want to sing such a difficult melody sober? But weren’t the English the ones who were bombarding Ft. McHenry and trying to destroy the flag? Why should we use one of their tunes? Don’t we have any good American drinking songs? (“Ninety-nine star spangled flags on the wall, 99 star spangled flags. You take one down, and pass it around...” Oh, I guess we don’t have any after all. Never mind.)
   
• The song never once even mentions America or the United States. In contrast, when you hear the song “O Canada,” with that powerful opening phrase, “O Canada,” you can be reasonably sure which country they’re talking about, eh? Not so with ours.
   
• It became our national anthem only in 1931. Many people think “The Star Spangled Banner” is enshrined in the Constitution or something. No, we survived for over 150 years without it, so we can learn to live without it again.

Personally, I think our national anthem should be “America the Beautiful.” And ONLY the Ray Charles version. Now that’s a powerful song that can make a patriotic American stand proudly on his ramparts with the twilight’s last gleaming in his misty eyes.