Boy oh boy, look at all the emotional bug splatter on the windshield of America over the national anthem! Some people are not standing for the Star Spangled Banner! How dare they protest in a nation where that right is allegedly guaranteed and is supposedly celebrated in that song! "Land of the free…" Hmm…well, I suppose so as long as you practice being free according to the method you are told to use.

I'm old enough to remember back when we had to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school. And there were these kids who didn't. Why? Because they were Jehovah's Witnesses, as I recall. And none of us scolded them and the teacher certainly didn't shame them. Because it was their First Amendment right to refuse to rise up and pay homage to a piece of cloth. But that was the 1970s before "patriotism" would rear its ugly head again and we would be told we could have actually won the Vietnam War had we just killed three million more people.

So some athlete refused to do the looking skyward inspirationally and weeping shtick while a song glorifying a war was sung off-key, so what? What has that got to do with me, you, or anyone else, for that matter? Now some school ball team in Texas has been getting death threats because they refused to play Star Spangled Banner Musical Chairs. How do you make a death threat to school kids anyway? Especially when trying to tell them how free American is? Does it go something like this: "You kids better start doing what you're told and standing up for the national anthem so you can show people how much you love freedom! Or we'll kill you!" Is that how it went? Gosh, that sounds like something the Soviets would have done. Or, perhaps, those people that Bush told us "hate freedom", you know, the terrorists. Whoever they are.

Why is anyone expected to stand up and celebrate some shredded piece of cloth that survived some long-ago battle? But more to the point, why is war what we sing about? Does war define who we are? I would say so. Other countries have national anthems that celebrate who they are as a people. That celebrate the land and so on. Us? Right, let's celebrate a war, complete with bombs bursting in air. And people underneath disembowelled by shrapnel, which part is conveniently left out of our national anthem and U.S. Army recruiting brochures. Am I expected to get chills up my spine when I hear this song? My spine is not in need of chilling since lower back pain is enough, thank you very much.