Short of just eliminating it from our varied, often ludicrous pregame rituals, it’s time to replace the national anthem with something that starts fewer arguments.
That’s my theme today, which I’m further identifying just in case I wander from the original point.
Like I do.
“America The Beautiful,” “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “The Flintstones Theme,” and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” are all superior substitutes, even if after eight minutes of B-flat minor in the last work, everyone would simply go home in tears.
We’re back at this anthem topic this week because the NBA came down swiftly on maverick Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban for just quietly forgetting to play The Star Spangled Banner prior to tip off at American Airlines Center, which maybe you’ve noticed is almost all middle seats.
For the first dozen or so games, virtually no one noticed Cuban’s little gambit, mostly owing to the fact that there were no fans in the building, but the decision to sideline the anthem in Dallas had a long rhetorical train of premeditation.
“We respect and always have respected the passion people have for the anthem and our country,” Cuban said after NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s hammer came down on his head. “But we also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them. We feel that their voices need to be respected and heard because they have not been.”
That was refreshing, if mostly because it’s true, and almost as much because a guy from Mt. Lebanon apparently said, “need to be respected,” instead of “need respected.”
But I’m not here to argue that people are completely within their rights to sit out the anthem as a form of social protest because that argument generally goes nowhere. The metaphorical wall has long since filed a cease and desist order against my head for that one.
I am instead arguing that it never made sense to play this alleged song before sporting events and that the history of the whole tortured relationship, from Francis Scott Key to Tommy Smith to John Carlos to Colin Kaepernick and through to Mark Cuban and Adam Silver no longer informs the current debate that should rightly collapse under the weight of its own intellectual bankruptcy.
Or something.
Make “Cotton Eye Joe” the national anthem.
Sure I hate it, but it obviously delighted the majority of their people at the Penguins games when there used to be people at Penguins games. Lyrics?
If it hadn't been for Cotton Eye Joe
I'd been married long time ago
Where did you come from, where did you go?
Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe?
That’s pretty much it. Over and over and over. Stand, sit, go for nachos, scrounge up $13 for another beer, nobody cares.
If that seems nonsensical, compare it to the apparent thought process behind the original usage of The Star Spangled Banner. The athletes have practiced obsessively, religiously, have just received a hot serving of inspirational coachspeak designed to make them virtually explode out of their skin; a crowd measured in thousands or ten thousands or even a hundred thousand has created an anticipation not often duplicated, and just before we drop it, tip it, or kick it off, let’s all spend a minute or two (or three!) standing and swaying while half-listening to a song.
And not a good song, either.
Not Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music (White Boy).” Not Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now (Mr. Fahrenheit).” No, instead, a centuries old poem set to a centuries old English drinking song that, centuries later, virtually no one can sing but virtually everyone can argue about without making any sense.
Though it wasn’t even officially the national anthem until 1931, The Star Spangled Banner had been around long enough to have been adopted by both sides in the Civil War. Mark Ferris, who wrote a book on the anthem, told USA Today recently, “The North won that tug of war. The irony is that the South’s anthem, Dixie, was written by an anti-slavery Northerner whereas The Star-Spangled Banner, the anthem of the North, was written by a slave-holding Southerner whose family supported the Confederacy” long after Key died in 1843.
Though it was first played at baseball games in the mid-19th century, the SSB wasn’t used widely until World War I and wasn’t part or our tradition until World War II, after which the Chicago Cubs apparently let it disappear without much complaint or notice until 1967, when they brought it back during Vietnam.
By that time, hockey had long since insisted on playing not one song, but two, whenever the game involved one team from Canada and one from the U.S. Perhaps because “O Canada” is a far superior song to The Star Spangled Banner, no one stopped and said, “Wait, we’re going to stand through two songs now before we drop the puck? Two songs?”
What about Juuso Riikola? He’s from Finland; shouldn’t we play the Finnish National Anthem (“Maamme”) before we get started? I know, let’s play the national anthems from all the home countries represented by players on the ice tonight, and then just forget about the game.
Or, OR!
We could just play.
That might be best.
Just play.
