SEARCHING FOR A NATIONAL SONG

by Cynthia MacGregor

(cont'd from yesterday)


The branches of the service stepped in, thinking maybe we’d take one of their songs and use it for the nation. We all sang loudly and lustily, “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along,” though nobody knows what a caisson is, so in caisson you were wondering, don’t ask me. We tried out, “From the Halls of Monty Zuma to the Shores of Triple-E” but decided we didn’t like glorifying a wide shoe size. Besides, Monty Zuma had already had his revenge on many of us, so we didn’t want to glorify him, either. The Air Force weighed in with, “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine,” but brave passengers in those early aeroplanes decided “Flying Machine” would have better been rhymed with “Dramamine.”

We still didn’t have a national song we could all agree on, but now we had all the branches of the service chiming in. This was not a silver service or a china service...or the 8:00 Sunday Mass, either.

Unable to get the nation to adopt one of their songs as the national song, the branches of the services began some competitive infighting to see who could recruit the most volunteers. The Navy appealed to wanderlust by proclaiming, “Join the Navy and see the world,” but George W. Bush, suspecting that the part of the world he was most likely to see if he joined the Navy was Vietnam, joined the Texas Guard instead. Though the Guard didn’t teach as much that’s militaristic as the other branches do, George thought he had really executed one fancy maneuver right there. He was so divinely delighted with the results that he wrote “Guard Bliss: America.” Irving Berlin challenged Dubya’s claim to authorship, but Dubya reminded Irving that Berlin was in Germany, so he couldn’t have written an American song.

After 9/11 there was much public maneuvering to get “God Bless America” named as our new national anthem. Its chief claim was that you can sing it without incurring vocal strain, but Larry N. Gitis objected to having his stake in the outcome reduced.

Meanwhile the rest of the nation was trying very hard to reduce too...mainly via Atkins. Americans had grown so fat that many required three chairs to sit on. This led to yet another attempt to find us a national song and had us singing, “Three chairs for the red, white, and blue.” But that didn’t catch on either.

The attempt to banish carbs had Detroit nervous—they thought the effort was aimed at banishing carburetors.

Of course, what the auto industry has done to America pollution-wise is a whole nother story. At first, places like L.A. and Detroit thought the dark, thick air was a natural product. Didn’t one of our many patriotic songs sing, “God, shed His grays on thee”?

That seemed to settle the question of which should be our Official National Anthem. But then we discovered that smog was far from Divine—either in origin or in what it did to our health. Instead, it was our Grossest National Product.

So here we are, still singing about a dancing troupe—I refer, of course, to the line about the Rockettes’ red glare—still straining our vocal cords on that line, and still calling in sick on Mondays because we got laryngitis as a result while singing the National Anthem at the ballgame on Sundays.

Either we need a new National Anthem or we need a new National Sport—one that doesn’t start each game with an appeal to the folks in the nosebleed seats: “O, say—can you see?”

Someone suggested “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land,” but Hawaii and Alaska nixed that because the song describes the land as “from California to the New York Island” and quite obviously leaves them out.

Now that they’ve eliminated the talent competition from the Miss America contest, maybe instead we should have each contestant be required to write a new National Anthem. If one of them comes up with a song that’s singable, doesn’t offend any of the states, and doesn’t enrich every ENT in your HMO, she might be the first of the pageant-winners to truly deserve the title
“Miss America.”

But the lack of a suitable patriotic song is not a reason for us to return to England’s fold. They’re so busy trying to hang onto a fading system of figurehead royalty that their national anthem is “God Save the Queen.”

Hmmm...in these days when we’re exhorted to “think globally,” maybe what we really need is a world anthem.