“Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?”
This is not an easy holiday for me, and I don’t think it’s an easy holiday for any person of color. Trayvon Martin’s been moldering in his grave for years, black professors are still getting slammed on the hoods of police cars for no reason, and the anniversary of Vincent Chin’s murder arrives every June to remind me exactly what my life is worth in America (an unpaid fine of $3,000, to be exact).
But, I’m not here to talk about that today. I’m here to talk about music. When I was a teenager, we sung the Star Spangled Banner every day in chorus class at the end of our warm up. It’s actually a pretty difficult song, and my extremely demanding chorus teacher, Mr. Tracy Murray, had put together a challenging arrangement. The bass harmony was particularly difficult. I could never get it quite right. I couldn’t find the harmony, having heard the melody at every sporting event, television show, and movie I’d ever seen.
Looking back, I could never quite get the story of America to sit right. A bunch of slave owning white men conspired to rebel against a tyrannical foreign crown because they didn’t want to pay their taxes? After which, we proceeded to keep black folks enslaved, deny women the vote, and ethnically cleanse North America of First Nations people? All the while promoting freedom, equality, and justice for all? That’s our great origin story? I’m supposed to feel patriotic about that? I hear the melody, and I’m supposed to provide the harmony.
Sorry. I promised I wasn’t going to talk about that today. After three years of singing the Star Spangled Banner every day (and cocking up the singing test on it every year) while simultaneously learning American history from two proud patriots and one Catholic almost-socialist (we had an interesting history department in my high school), the song had lost most of its luster and all of its emotional impact. I was glad to go to college, a place where I had greater autonomy to express what utter bullshit I found this country to be.
“Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?”
A week into the fall of my freshman year in 2001, I was singing the national anthem five days after 9/11, while loading supplies into a truck in the Jacob Javits Center.
Remember this?
I got to see this with my own eyes, at the tender age of eighteen. Not something I like remembering. When I first heard about 9/11, the first thing I remember thinking was that a lot of people were going to get hurt for no reason. And sadly, I was right. I continue to be right. (Sometimes I like being right, but I can’t say I’m happy that things turned out the way I predicted.)
But I also remember loading supplies into that truck, handing them to a smiling white man who handed them to a Latina woman wearing a particle mask as we loaded them into a dump truck. We were a nation that was pulling together. An outside enemy does that. But so does tragedy. So does the human reality of death, of loss. Singing that song, on that day, meant something to me. But it lost its power again when it, and its patriotic context, was was so ruthlessly exploited during the run up to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Today, after a string of vicious, disappointing Supreme Court decisions regarding unions and a woman’s right to reproductive freedom and a few really aggravating discussions on Facebook, I got to listen to my wife and her friends work on an arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner.
My wife often talks about leaving America. She rightfully found the Republican rape culture rhetoric (Akin, Ryan, Mourdock, et al) during the election of 2012 to be terrifying and awful. I don’t know how to assuage her fears that these beliefs aren’t a clear and present danger to her personal freedom. I probably shouldn’t – these are the kinds of men you ought to be terrified of.
At times like this, I think that this can’t be why my grandparents and great grandparents came to this country – to have their grandson live in fear of racially motivated violence, for their granddaughter in law to live in fear of the rape culture.
“And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;”
Sorry. I’m doing it again.
Music. The Star Spangled Banner was written by Francis Scott Key during the war of 1812, during the British bombardment of Baltimore. There are four verses, but only the first one is commonly sung today. It was originally a poem, not a song, and was set to a British drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven” – this is me summarizing the wiki article for you. The point is this: our national anthem is about endurance. Racists and demagogues often use it to vilify the boogeyman of the week, whether it’s Muslims or Latinos or black folks or Chinese labor or Indian tech workers or whatever.
But the truth is, it’s a song about endurance. It’s about surviving a shelling, battered but unbroken. Do you know what artillery is? It’s an indirect fire weapon that blows up targets by shooting over their static defenses. Working folks, women, people of color, sexual minorities, trans* folks, differently abled people – we are the ones surviving. We are the ones enduring. We are the ones getting shelled every day and every night. When we turn on the TV, the radio, go to the movies, fire up the internet, while going out to buy Skittles and iced tea, while trying to drive home, while just trying to live our lives. We are the duck and cover. We are the ones with our heads down, but our chins up.
It’s not their song. It’s our song. And these days, I can’t help but be moved when I hear it.
So while in the past, it has belonged to murderous ultrapatriots, to the exploitative businessmen, to the panicked working class folks who have embraced racial scapegoating, it doesn’t have to be that way.
The story of America is also the story of Geronimo, of MLK, of Harriet Tubman, of Malcolm X, of rioting Chinese coolies who refused to be used as slave labor, of the Heart Mountain resisters, of Cesar Chavez, of Stonewall, of all those Americans who refused to swallow the lie and instead fought for the truth. For their simple right to be here, to be seen as Americans, as people. The flag is still there.
Defense is a demand. It’s standing your ground, not as a terrified coward with a gun, but as an immovable stone mountain. We keep demanding. We keep defending.
The American struggle has always been the battle to bridge the gap between reality and our ideals. It’s a battle that I willingly fight, that must be fought for my future children and for the world. The America I love is not the America that is, but the America that can yet be. The America that we have the temerity to dream about, to write about, to fight for, that generations before me have fought for. The flag is still there.
Today, I’m not demanding obedience. I’m not asking you to die for anything. I’m asking you to remain, as you have, stalwart. And when the shells whistle toward you, remember whose country this is. Whose country it will always be.
“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
The flag is still there.
Happy Fourth of July everybody.
like an open book 