Why I Don’t Sing the National Anthem

By Colman McCarthy

Nationalists on the Right and nationalists on the Left are huffing that “The Star-Spangled Banner” must be sung only in English. And should any of those 12 million undocumented immigrants go to a baseball game and dare sing “a la luz de la aurora” instead of “by the dawn’s early light,” well, that’s another reason to stash them on Greyhounds going south.

Left out in the English or Spanish debate is a third option: dump the national anthem altogether. It’s little more than a war song, glorifying the lethal mayhem of rockets and the violence of bombs bursting—and then frosted at the end with patriotic pap about freedom and bravery.

Count me out. At public events when the star-spangled bomb song is played, I choose neither to sing it nor stand while others do. Why cooperate with a fake ritual that rings as hollow as the “and God bless America” line that politicians tack on at the end of their speeches.

The U.S. isn’t the only place stuck with a bellicose anthem, leading me to think that were I residing in another land I’d have no reason to sing or stand there either. The Danes of Denmark are hot for patriotic gore:

King Christian stood by the lofty mast

In mist and smoke

His sword was hammering so fast

Through Gothic helm and brain it past.

The French “Marseillaise,” adopted in 1795 and sung with joie de vivre, gets right to basics:

Arise you children of our Motherland.

Oh now is here our glorious day!

Over us the bloodstained banner of tyranny holds sway….

Oh, do you hear there in our fields

The roar of those fierce fighting men?

Who came right here in our midst

To slaughter sons, wives and kin?

To arms, oh citizens!

Form up in serried ranks!

March on, march on!

And drench our fields

With their tainted blood.

Libyans also fret about invading bad guys:

O World, look up and listen

The enemy’s army is coming,

Rising to destroy me.

With truth and my gun I shall repulse him…

And should I be killed,

I would kill him with me—

Woe to the imperialists.

South of the border, Guatemalans are worried about saliva:

Guatemala, blest land, home of happy race,

May thine altars be not profaned,

Nor yoke of slavery weigh on thee ever.

Nor may tyrants ever spit in thy face.

For a time, I thought that should America ever decide to drop its irrational anthem, a fit replacement would be Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” But then I wondered, was this land really “made for you and me”? What about the animals, trees, rocks and the other co-inhabitants spinning through the universe with us? Land wasn’t made for us, anymore than air or sunlight. Land has a spiritual value totally free of any

utilitarian use of a people who, delusional, think it was “made” for them.

Whether we’re scorned as kvetches or klutzes, those of us who want an anthem that lifts the human spirit rather than lowers it are ready to stand and sing with the Finns and their “Finlandia.”

This is my song, O God of all the nations

A song of peace for lands afar and mine

This is my home, the country where my heart is

Here are my hopes and dreams, my holy shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean

And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine

O hear my song, thou God of all the nations

A song of peace for their land and for mine.