A modest proposal to deconsecrate America's "second national anthem."
by Jack Neely
I consider myself a patriotic guy. The Fourth of July is my favorite holiday. I've voted in every major election since I turned 18. I pay my taxes without complaint. I go to every Veterans' Day parade and applaud the songs the bands play. All of them except one.
See, I like most patriotic songs. I have defended the National Anthem from slander that it's musically weird and hard to sing. That's part of its charm, I say. "America the Beautiful" can make me weep. I like brassy show tunes like "God Bless America," and I've been known to get chills hearing a good marching band play "Battle Hymn of the Republic" or any of several Sousa tunes. I can hum every note of "Stars & Stripes Forever," and if you see me marching down Union Avenue, maybe that's what I'm doing.
But there's one song that, if I ever hear it again—and I'll probably hear it again this afternoon—it will be too soon. I have avoided attending certain public events for the hazard that I might overhear it amplified.
I bet you know the one. Most folks I know dislike the song as much as I do. Musicians don't like to play it. Some Republicans are embarrassed that it has become the GOP's fight song. When it was introduced, it got terrible reviews: "trite," "overblown," "banal," "cornball," "insipid pop," "formulaic," "plasticized." But nobody wants to say so very loudly today. It has, after all, been called our "second national anthem." It's trumpeted at most patriotic occasions these days even, recently, the centennial of the Wright Brothers first flight. We have to be careful to pay it homage; recently, a teenager attending a Houston rodeo was assaulted by an angry crowd when he declined to stand up for it. It has become the 21st century's version of the Emperor's New Clothes.
The first time I heard the song was one strange evening in 1984. I was innocently enjoying my usual beer and a slice down at Stefano's Pizza on Cumberland Avenue. It was the only place I ever saw MTV, which, in those days, seemed a surprising new art form. But this one evening there was a video that stood sharply apart from the interesting ones. On the screen was a seamy-looking guy I thought I recognized from the TVA&I Fair, looking out of place while praying for the camera at the head of a Thanksgiving table, as if he were interpreting a Norman Rockwell poster as a music video.
I could have gagged on my whole-wheat crust. The video was as cloying as a supermarket greeting card, and the song itself had problems you don't have to be a music scholar to notice. Though it's a musically awkward tune, it employs some well-worn clich�s, like a repeatedly rising melody that I suspect has probably been proven to induce a sense of complacent well-being in laboratory rats.
It sounded something like one of the more sentimental McDonald's commercials. Later one, I wasn't surprised that the singer had done some McDonald's commercials. I have to admit that I thought, with the sneaky admiration you have for a hustler, why didn't I think of that.
"Dude ain't going broke singing that song," remarked some beery clairvoyant nearby. Patriotism was back in fashion in middle America, but nobody had recorded a patriotic pop song in 15 years or more. Anybody who recorded a new song for the boosterish Reagan-Bush era, regardless of the song's quality, would make millions. And, of course, he did. But I took it to be one of the many fleeting embarrassments of living in 1984. I never imagined Lee Greenood would still be wearing his flag blouse and singing "God Bless the USA" 20 years later. Or that I'd hear it every time I watched a parade on Gay Street.
I have long felt sorry for organizers of parades, patriotic benefits and other commemorative celebrations. The United States probably has a greater arsenal of worthy patriotic songs than any nation in the world, and if we'd stick with them, I'd be happy. But our patriotic songs are all pretty old, and you can't blame party planners for always wanting to add something new to appeal to the youngsters. The problem is that few talented songwriters since Irving Berlin have been inspired to write a strong patriotic song.
Several years ago, I attended a large banquet honoring officers of the regional division of one branch of the armed forces. Most of the attendees were veterans, and I enjoyed talking with them. After dinner, there was a presentation of a film of modern servicement doing their duty, in stirring action scenes. The film was very well done. But the film's rousing soundtrack was Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son."
It's a great rock'n'roll song, a big radio hit during the Vietnam era, but there's nothing patriotic about it. It's an angry screed against the U.S. military from the point of view of a poor man who feels he has gained nothing from being an American. The drawled lyrics do include audible shouts of "red, white, and blue" and "hail to the chief," and "star-spangled" something. So someone thought it would work well for an officers' banquet. For those who didn't listen closely, maybe it worked fine.
Standards for modern patriotic songs are pretty low, after all, and you settle for what you can find. Hence the instant and seemingly permanent success of "God Bless the USA."
It didn't take long for Greenwood's song to be recruited for use in Republican presidential campaigns. It was used the very year it was released, by the Reagan re-election team. That same year the campaign also attempted to enlist Bruce Springsteen's bitterly ironic lament, "Born In the USA," until the songwriter objected. Campaigners that year were obviously eager to exalt any song with USA in the title. It must have been a relief, after the military's earlier use of songs like the Village People's "In the Navy," to find one, just one, patriotic pop song, regardless of any concerns about its quality, that didn't have hidden meanings.
"God Bless the USA" apparently fit the bill. It was used again by George H.W. Bush, especially upon the conclusion of the Gulf War.
Lee Greenwood's career was flagging a little when he moved to our metro area in early 1996; he stayed here for half a decade running a music theater and restaurant in Sevierville. He called it quits there about three years ago. According to some sympathetic biographies, September 11, 2001, revived his song, and revived his career.
Along the way, the singer has found hundreds of occasions to declare to audiences that he'd "stand up next to you and protect her still today." He has won more medals from the American Legion, the VFW, the AMVETs, and the Congressional Medal of Honor Society than most combat veterans have. Greenwood has certainly won more medals than any young man who spent the Vietnam era on the Vegas lounge circuit, singing in strip clubs and dealing blackjack. You've got to hand it to him.
In the song, the singer imagines surviving some unnamed personal cataclysm "with just my children and my wife." If he didn't know much about war, Greenwood knew plenty about wives; when he wrote the song at about 42, he'd already enjoyed several. It might be impertinent to ask which wife he was thinking about. I'm pretty sure it wasn't his current one, the 1989 Miss Tennessee. She was just a kid then, an aspiring Junior Miss.
Some have questioned these biographical details behind Greenwood's declarations, but I won't. He's a singer/songwriter, and not necessarily the guy he's singing about. Greenwood wasn't necessarily a volunteer soldier or an ideal husband. Johnny Cash didn't necessarily shoot a man in Reno.
I'm not judging the songwriter. But I can't help judging his song, every time I hear it, which is way too much.
The song has all kinds of problems, too many to enumerate in this issue. The melody sometimes emphasizes unfortunate words, like doubt, and its forced pauses make the rhyme scheme sound like there's something amiss. On the most superficial level, the grammatical one, it's afflicted with little syntactical oddities sprinkled throughout the song, but it's the chorus that's most problematic. It starts,
I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free....
That that one couplet is afflicted with syntactical problems that might provoke teachers in other English-speaking countries to wonder whether the American educational system was working.
For a newspaperman, I'm uncommonly liberal about breaking grammatical rules. Ask my editor. But listening to Mr. Greenwood's lyrics is like watching the Phil Fulmer show after the Vols lose, the rerun of a pass play gone wrong, played in an eternal loop. Every time Mr. Greenwood sings it, the word where scampers around the backfield in search of an antecedent, and never, ever finds it. It's like watching the same incomplete pass, over and over and over.
It would be grammatically correct, if a little awkward, to say "I'm proud to live in America, where at least I know I'm free." At least you've mentioned an actual place to go with the where. Maybe he had questions about whether it made sense for anybody to be proud to live in the country where you were born, which raises other philosophical questions I won't touch.
You could just leave where out and replace it with a semicolon. Actually, it would conform to the line's roughly iambic trimeter better. It still wouldn't sound like much.
But as it is, the where doesn't connect to anything. And, after all, you could still "be an American" in China. But you wouldn't say "where at least I know I'm free" there, would you? It's a frustrating dilemma for which, as a fellow writer, I sympathize. But he didn't solve it.
The second syntactical problem is not so much an error as an inadvertent self-deprecation of Americanism, or of the singer's wealth of knowledge. The use of the phrase "at least" where it is seems to suggest that the singer doesn't know much—or that being an American doesn't imply much.
"At least I know..." anything seems to imply that one is admitting that one doesn't know much else beyond what they're about to impart; and, in context, perhaps that one doesn't know very much else because one is an American. It sounds like something Gilligan, or Curly, would say.
The 'at least' could also be understood to mean that there's not much to being an American, that freedom's some kind of a base condition, leaving much to be desired. I Googled the phrase 'at least I know,' and one of the most quoted uses of the phrase after Mr. Greenwood's came from Timothy McVeigh's mother: "At least I know he's human," she said. Well, that's something to start with.
The fact that it's so sloppily written is only one of the reasons I have a hard time singing along. That one stanza alone conveys deeper troubles of a philosophical and historical nature.
It's a proud song, and proud of the fact that it's a proud song. He says he's "proud to be an American" and that there's "pride in every American heart."
The concept of announcing that you're proud of being an American might have alarmed our founding fathers. For centuries, pride was, along with gluttony and lust, one of the deadly sins. You wouldn't boast that you were "proud" any more than you'd boast that you were avaricious or slothful.
Proverbs counsels us that "pride goeth before destruction." In Isaiah, Jehovah promised that He would "cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease." It's not clear whether He anticipated Mr. Greenwood.
The theologian Spinoza defined pride as "pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself." "From pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy," goes the Book of Common Prayer, "good Lord, deliver us." To that list I might add this song.
Maybe we have, as a culture, decided that six deadly sins are plenty, and it's time to retire pride from the list. Let's assume that Jehovah changed His mind, and now it's OK to be proud, and to crow about being proud—just as long as we're patriotic about it. After all, there is that oblique reference to "pilgrims' pride" in "Our Country 'Tis Of Thee" (Those abstemious people, who lived two centuries before that 19th-century line was written, weren't around to be offended).
But in that same tortured sentence, there's a more important aberration, which appears to betray an alternative interpretation of our history: "and I won't forget the men who died / And gave that right to me." The usual assumption is that it's a reference to servicemen who died in battle.
Hundreds of thousands of men have died protecting American interests, and in the name of freedom. Greenwood's assertion is that soldiers actually gave us our freedoms. That's a fairly common, but I think fairly recent, belief: that soldiers—not statesmen or judges or God—gave us our rights. That rarely challenged assumption, taken to extremes, could lead us in all sorts of uncomfortable and undemocratic directions. In many parts of the world, the people feel they owe the military everything; in those places, the military has a habit of taking over altogether, and then doles out whatever rights the people do enjoy. But in America when, exactly, did any man fight or die to give us our rights to be free?
Now, there's a bonus question for the final. The United States has been involved in lots of wars involving freedom for other peoples. If things work out in Iraq, with a lot of money, a lot of hard work, a lot of blood, and a lot of luck, Americans may be bestowing freedom on a people that has never known the sort of freedom we cherish.
But Americans have rarely fought to give rights to Americans. The Civil War was partly about rights, and the Union victory resulted in affirming some Americans' rights. Though few Union soldiers were consciously fighting for rights, their victories resulted in freedom for slaves. Blacks who are descendents of slaves might claim that fighting men "gave" them their rights—though I suspect most would prefer to believe they were born with rights, and other men had kept them from enjoying them.
Maybe the soldiers of the Revolutionary War were "the men who died" that Mr. Greenwood references. The patriots were fighting for national freedom from the mother country—but not necessarily for personal freedoms.
Americans, like most English-speaking peoples, had generally secured the freedoms to speech, assembly and religion long before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775. England was no police state; 18th-century London was a carnival of new and conflicting ideas on science, religion, and democracy, expressed freely in streets and coffee houses.
The sad, unmanly fact is that our rights, for the most part, evolved peacefully, through flurries of litigation and legislation, both here and in England, over a period of centuries. The Magna Carta, English Common Law, the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The Revolution was more a war for independence than for personal rights.
However, the war did clear the way, about eight years after its successful conclusion, for a group of politicians led by James Madison to ratify the Bill of Rights. For the most part, they just codified, perhaps more clearly and dependably than George III was likely to, rights Americans already expected.
But I think Greenwood's line is already changing the way Americans think of the origin of their rights. In recent months I have overheard what is maybe an honest reaction to antiwar protesters: "How dare they—those soldiers gave them that right."
It's a line that's arguably unpatriotic, and, to religious people, perhaps even blasphemous. It directly contradicts America's most hallowed document, the one we celebrate every 4th of July, the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson spelled out our rights, and their origin. "We hold these Truths to be self evident, that all Men...are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Jefferson and all the signers of the Declaration, including Washington, Adams, and Franklin, asserted that God alone gave us our rights. Lee Greenwood tells us that men gave us our rights. Whom are we to believe?
So the song has problems. So do lots of other pop songs that came out in 1984. Our problem is that we're free to hate all the other dumb pop songs of that year, but we're supposed to honor this one, perhaps for the rest of our lives.
People criticize it almost in a whisper, kind of like Iraqi democrats used to whisper about Saddam, if it's somehow unpatriotic to hate it. I have actually been counseled to take it easy with this essay. We're not free, they say.
I have come to understand that Greenwood's song has become our star-spangled sacred cow, and 20 years after MTV debuted it, is already slipping into the canon alongside "America the Beautiful." We're supposed to overlook the faults of this smarmy McDonald's commercial of a song and stand up and cheer when we hear it.
I won't. This is, after all, America.
January 22, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 4
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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