La bandera de las estrellas

Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it - and they're likely to be Republicans too. I have no doubt that the hoo-ha about singing the National Anthem in Spanish, even if one isn't singing it in the US and one has no status as the leader of any kind of movement, is a smokescreen to keep us from thinking too hard about the President's failures, but what I didn't know is that this latest Republican nonsense has the same foundation in falsehood as Bush's proclamation that 9/11 was the first attack by an enemy on American soil.

According to Thinkprogress.org the U.S. Bureau of Education commissioned a Spanish-language version of “The Star Spangled Banner” way back in 1919. The State Department’s website also features four-separate versions of the anthem in Spanish. So when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a resolution requiring the Star-Spangled banner to be sung only in English yesterday he either showed a typical Republican ignorance or a typical Republican unconcern for veracity or a typical Republican willingness to lie in order to enrage the Red State rabble. Maybe it was all three that prompted him to say that the anthem had “never before…been rendered in another language.”

Issues of free speech aside (and I'm sure the Republican Royalists would like to set it aside) the logic behind requiring it to be sung only in English begs the question: why aren't all things considered by the idiot party to be central to our "traditions" limited to English - like the Bible? That way we won't be bothered by scholars telling us that it doesn't say what the Sunday school teacher said it did. Maybe too, we should be restricted to praising the President in fractured English since that's as much a tradition in their eyes as anything else.

Hell, let's make sure nobody speaks anything else - that's close enough to the current state of affairs anyway - and nobody dare translate our Constitution or Bill of Rights into French. We don't want foreigners to know what Lincoln said or Washington Said - hell we don't even want Americans to know. That will just cheapen our sacred documents and allow people to expect us to live up to them.

Now let us please go to the US State Department website and sing after me. . . .

Amanece: ¿no veis, a la luz de la aurora,
Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer?
Sus estrellas, sus barras flotaban ayer
En el fiero combate en señal de victoria,
Fulgor de cohetes, de bombas estruendo,
Por la noche decían: "!Se va defendiendo!"

PS:

An as yet unconfirmed report has it that when Bush was campaigning in 2000, he sang the anthem in Spanish in Hispanic neighborhoods accompanied by a Mariachi band from Texas.