Alfred Gingold has written eight books, Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column, Erik Tarloff is a novelist and Slate Book Clubber, and Josh Daniel is Slate's managing editor. This week they weigh the merits of our patriotic greatest hits.
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StumbleUponOK, inspired by the unfettered disputation (to be polite about it) in "The Fray," I'm not going to pull any punches. Guys, get real. "The Star-Spangled Banner" is the clear winner. Even its unsingability is a plus; all that screeching at the top notes, redolent of countless baseball games and innumerable Independence Day picnics, shimmers with tradition and—dare I say it?—nationalistic solemnity.
Tim, no points. "America the Beautiful" is, let's face it, a profoundly dull song. While sitting through it, you can grow a beard, your children can go through puberty and head off to college, and you haven't even reached the second verse. And I'm leaving to the side the dubious adjective "fruited," which by itself puts the whole thing hors de concours.
Josh, "This Land Is Your Land" is a fine ditty in its way, but it lacks the heft of a national anthem. It makes you want to hold hands with the people on either side of you and sway, not rise to your feet and salute Old Glory.
And Alfred, with all due respect, "God Bless America" isn't even good Irving Berlin. It has some of the coercive power of "Bill Hogan's Goat"—it's irresistible at a sing-along—and I don't mean that as praise.
Besides, if Josh and Alfred want to insist on something sort of popular and sort of contemporary (if we consider the last 100 years or so contemporary), there's a much better choice. It's a song that expresses love of country, it has some of the irreverence we're proud to regard as a vital aspect of our national character, and it has the additional advantage of coming from a show that won a Pulitzer Prize. It's called "Of Thee I Sing," a title which tips its hat to an older patriotic anthem. Here: even though I prefer it at march tempo, give a listen to Michael Feinstein's somewhat lugubrious rendition.
Before closing, I do want to offer a cautionary word to my "Star-Spangled Banner" allies in the Fray. Many of them seem to regard the song's official status as having the same sacred provenance as our founding documents, as being on a par with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But it wasn't officially designated our national anthem until 1931, virtually within living memory. And—this merits a mention because those who have advocated other candidates have frequently been dismissed by my Fray allies as pinko liberal scum—it was designated the national anthem by a Democratic congress. So, even though I agree with your preference, I don't think feeling otherwise is necessarily evidence of seditionary tendencies. All the songs under consideration are patriotic songs. Nobody is advocating "The Internationale," or Randy Newman's "Sail Away," or "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," or anything of that nature.
Finally, let me reiterate that I find the tone of much of the Fray this go-round distressingly intemperate. The tragedy of Sept. 11, we are told, has brought us together, as a nation and as a people. You wouldn't know it to read the Fray. If I can sum up a typical posting, it would go something like this: "My choice for national anthem celebrates freedom, and if you don't agree, you should be thrown in jail."
Which brings to mind another national anthem. One that Mel Brooks, in his character of the 2,000-Year-Old Man, tells us was the very first national anthem ever sung. Its goes, "Let them all go to hell except Cave 76!"
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Joseph Britt also commented on Erik Tarloff's remarks on the Fray; in fact Mr Tarloff is a very experienced Fray-watcher--see also BML's post here. BML also introduced the tangential but deeply fascinating topic of songs about states, here, while Urquhart revealed that Tennessee has six official state songs.]
Has it occurred to anyone else that Americans tend to regard singing the way our colonial ancestors regarded combat--as something anyone can do without any training or discipline, based on their natural ability? I think of this every time I hear someone moaning about how hard "The Star-Spangled Banner" (or, for that matter, "O Holy Night") is to sing. It's certainly a challenge, but challenges can be mastered by most people with a little practice and the right technique.
It goes back to the lamentable low standard of musical education in the public schools, a product of the soft bigotry of low musical expectations. It may be that currently popular music that is designed only to be danced to, not sung along with, bears some responsibility also. Thankfully no one has suggested we ought to have a national anthem we can dance to, not even in The Fray.
--Joseph Britt
(To reply, click here.)
I have to cast my vote with Josh on this one. Despite its terminal hootenanny connotations, "This Land" as a national anthem would be a defining break with the pseudo-arch prosody of nationalistic anthems, and would be in fact the first democratic people's anthem in history. Is that worth something?
Forget Pete Seeger and the debacles of the American Communist Party's Stalinization for a minute and think about the real progeny of Guthrie's road-minstrel folk revival: the entire boom baby generation. We came of age in a landscape where geiger counters were replacing rosaries, and the language of Dick and Jane had replaced the Bible and McGuffy's reader as our entree to literacy. We made out to the lyrics of doo-wop and had our moral awakenings in the turgid prose of surgeon-general's warnings.
We don't need, nor can we parse, the locutions of the founding fathers. While I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who could have paraphrased "The Star Spangled Banner," or glossed it beyond "something about rockets and our flag, kind of tattered, some battle. Baltimore?"
"God Bless America" is the song of Lion's Clubs and Rotary lunches, tent revivals and mall openings. It is for my generation an evocation of black and white rotoscope images of Milton Berle and Pearl Bailey. There is something contrived and reminiscent of gastro-intestinal finales at fund raisers and school auditoriums. It is the song of an ersatz America, a formulaic tin-pan populism that never really reaches beyond the footlights into the junk drawers, closets, photo albums and reveries of a real America.
I know that "TLIYL" will never become our national anthem. But it is a song closer to the dead center of the bell curve of true American sentiment than any of the others mentioned here.
--Zeitguy
(To reply, click here.)
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