The current uproar over singing the American national anthem in Spanish instead of English is another cudgel against whipping the immigrant experience in the United States.
An anthem is a song.
Is a song its words or its melody?
Do the same people who object to the Star-Spangled Banner being sung in
Spanish also complain when the same song is played instrumentally? Does
it matter if the band playing the instrumental version speaks English
or Spanish?
Or is the intent of the music and the quality of the
performance the only things that matter?
If a song is more its melody and lesser its lyric — and you know
melody matters most because the Star-Spangled Banner is often performed
in public without words and I have yet to hear it performed in front of
an audience by only speaking its lyric — then a song is a song and if
the lyric is translated into languages other than English, isn’t that a
good thing?
Isn’t that an appropriate blending of cultures to form a
prismal national identity? Isn’t that truly a way of thinking and
behaving on a multi-national level?
Burning an American Flag
has more gravitas and grounding as an issue for national consideration
in the American consciousness than this faux argument over the language
used to perform a great song that needs no words to be understood and
recognized and respected as the anthem for a tender nation.