It happened again. At a Roller Derby again. Miriam and I arrived a little late for a Windy City Rollers bout, and someone was already singing the Star Spangled Banner. As usual, the melody was virtually unsingable, and the words obviously written by a patriot who was a better lawyer than poet. As usual, the performance by the singer was, as American Idol's Randy Jackson would say, "a little pitchy."
And as usual, it gave me goosebumps. For better or worse, it's our song. It probably seems quaint to people from elsewhere that we sing it before any kind of sporting event. Maybe out there in Liberal, Kansas, they sing it before their cowpie throwing contests.
We started singing or playing the anthem back when I was in grade school, doing air raid drills several times a week, which we took very seriously: Instead of feeling invulnerable so close to the center of the (then) 48 states, we feared that sooner or later our enemies would manage a massive bombing of the warplane factories that circled my home town. I guess it was in those days that the Star Spangled Banner became every American's song.
So it's quaint. So being an American is quaint. So what?
Others are amused, or horrified, by a lot of things about us. I've traveled enough, and I'm multilingual enough, to know some of them. Our willingness to drink beer that doesn't taste much better than dishwater, served ice cold in a chilled mug, freezing our taste buds into submission. The paradoxical carnage in our streets, fertilized by the naive belief that any American crackpot has the right to arm himself to the teeth and call himself a militia. Writing the return address on the front of the envelope. Declaring holidays to honor great people but spending those holidays fishing and drinking. Our paranoia about having essential services under the direction of our elected representatives instead of anonymous, profit-driven corporations. Constant whining about our postal service, in spite of it being among the best in the world.
That's just who we are, for better or worse. We make changes grudgingly, slowly, but change and adjust we do. When the chips are down, we can suddenly act like grown ups and the next day wage war like no other nation in the history of the world. Like the self-assured oaf who happens to be a 250-pound black belt, you can laugh at us all you want, but lay a hand on us, and we'll break you in half.
Under various circumstances our malignant unilingualism is, to the rest of the world, amusing, frustrating, disgusting, and pathetic. In Europe, I want to crawl in a hole when one of my fellow countrymen displays his belief that anyone of average intelligence, anywhere on earth, will understand whatever kind of fourth grade English he knows if he just yells loudly enough. We send our kids to Spanish classes, and think we've given them a second language when we've taught them to conjugate three regular verbs in the present tense after only two years. Charmingly, instead of being disgusted with the low quality of our language training, some of us compensate by acting as though we're under attack when they see a directional sign in Spanish. Our emergency workers shouldn't have to know important phrases in other leading languages: We're above that. But by God, people in other nations better be able to assist us in English. We deserve that!
Like I said, quaint, and that's putting it nicely.
I'm patriotic to the United States of America, but I don't give a damn about the English language. Since I've tested somewhere around the 98th percentile in knowledge of English, I have no qualms about saying I'm not patriotic to a language. Even if I do get lazy and say "youse" at times, or I'm about to make a beer run and ask a guest if he wants to "go with." So I'm quaint too.
Languages of the Cherokee and Iroquois were here before English. French was spoken in much of what is now the continental U.S. before English. A lot of those "Mexicans" in our southwest are descendents of people who were already living here when we forcibly took that land from Mexico. At the time of the Revolutionary War, more Americans spoke German than English.
Being American isn't about speaking English, although, admittedly, it's a convenience. We have bigger issues facing us. Making English the "official" language of a state, or of the nation, won't solve any of our problems. In fact, it won't do as much to resolve language difficulties as would just improving the teaching of languages in our schools and universities.
It bothers me when someone complains about hearing the Star Spangled Banner sung in Spanish or some other language other than English. That's not only quaint, it's damned disgusting! That's our song. That's my song! I'm happy to hear it sung, however badly, with pride and enthusiasm, in any language.
If a non-English rendition of our national anthem offends you, stop and think: Are you honoring your nation, or your ignorance?