The l A Times just ran a long piece by Jody Rosen calling for a new national anthem. Now. He notes at last month San Francisco protesters pulled down the statue Francis Scott Key in Golden Gate Park. Scott Key wrote the words to the Star Spangled Banner that the left now calls racist. Besides, very few singers can do justice to that difficult too, and it's a British melody anyway, so the anthem has to go. Now what should replace it? Well?
Mr Rosen claims that songs like lift Every Voice and Sing and America the Beautiful out of step with the twenty one century this Land is Your Land. That doesn't cut it either, Rosen says, because it insults indigenous Americans, even though it was written by Woody Guthrie, a big loony lefty imagine by John Lennon. That's another British song with drippy utopianism. Plus Lennon was super rich. So nobody buys his day dream of a world with no possessions
because he would never get rid of his is. Well, then what's the perfect song that should replace the Star Spangled Banner? Rosen proposes Lean On Me by Bill withers its messages I'll take care of you, you take care of me. Everybody knows it, and everybody can sing it. That's the kind of story we would laugh at twenty years ago, but not anymore. This stuff can't be laughed off.
These people are dead serious, and don't rule out that somebody of considerable weight is actually going to suggest this someday down the road.