From Yahoo News:
Why it might be time to finally replace ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with a new national anthem
Last week, protesters in San Francisco toppled a statue of the song’s composer, Francis Scott Key, a known slaveholder who once said that African Americans were “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.” This week, Liana Morales, an Afro-Latinx student at New York’s Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts, refused to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at her virtual graduation ceremony, explaining to the Wall Street Journal, “With everything that’s happening, if I stand there and sing it, I’m being complicit to a system that has oppressed people of color.” Instead, Morales performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn widely considered to be the “Black national anthem.”
Activist and journalist Kevin Powell, author of the new book When We Free the World, says it’s important to understand the song’s racist legacy, starting with Key’s bigoted background.
“Francis Scott Key, he was a big-time guy in terms of the American colonization of society,” adds Walker. “This was not just a person who just lived in the time period. This is a person who helped define the time period.”
Key also came from a slave owning family.
All this being said, Powell doesn’t pass judgement on the many Black artists who’ve performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at high-profile events in the past — though he predicts that many artists will start refusing to sing it in the near future, in a movement similar to Colin Kaepernick and his supporters taking a knee during the anthem in recent years.
Jimi Hendrix wasn’t woke enough for current black leaders.
My money is the NBA and NFL will stop singing the National Anthem before games this year.
Celebrities will refuse to do it for the venues that don’t stop.
So, if “The Star-Spangled Banner” goes the way of the Confederate flag and Gone With the Wind, what should America’s new national anthem be? Whatever it is, Walker says there should be a formal “vetting process” to make sure the next anthem doesn’t have a terrible past; Powell, for his part, suggests John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which he says is “the most beautiful, unifying, all-people, all-backgrounds-together kind of song you could have.”
They literally want a national anthem that contains the lyrics:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world, you
It is literally an anti-national anthem. It’s nihilistic bullshit. That is what they want.
These people really hate America and are going to manipulate everything to justify their desire to destroy it all.
You want to wake up the dragon, tell millions of Americans that they are canceled for singing the Star Spangled Banner because it was based on a poem written by a guy born into a slave owning family.
That’s a sure fire way to get their asses burned.
So she is Afro-Latinix. Latinix is not a word, bu if they do not like the gendering of stuff, then should it also not be Afrix? So she is Afrix-latinix? Sure, I can get behind that
I prefer “moron”. Seems a lot more descriptive.
The Latinx is due Spanish being a gendered language. There are masculine and feminine words, and versions of words. Muchacho versus muchacha, male versus female. I do not believe that would apply to Africa, as the name is not gendered.
However, just for fun, my favorite idiot, Alexandria Occasionally Coherent, refers to herself as a latinx. Which means she is rejecting gender as part of her heritage. And, if she is rejecting her gender from a heritage standpoint, she has also rejected her claim as the youngest female elected to Congress. No gender in your language, carry it through to the rest of your world honey.
If they want to replace the Star Spangled Banner, I propose Lee Greewood’s God Bless the USA. Of course they probably want the Internationale.
Nah, let’s go with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Because a song first written by the abolitionist Republican Party extolling the glories to be found in killing Democratic slave-owners; then sung proudly by tens of thousands of American soldiers as they went out to make it happen… Well, that’s just a damn fine tune.
Easier to sing than The Star-Spangled Banner too.
Oh yes.
I still have the graphic I made in September 2001. The background is an American flag. (Another version has the photo of the fireman raising the flag over the ruins of the WTC.) The foreground is the text of the Battle Hymn. All of its verses, not just the well known first verse.
Be sure to read all the verses when you get a chance. The 3rd and 4th are particularly inspiring.
“Well, I guess I’m a racist now”, coming to a country near you.
The splatter isn’t coming, it’s already begun. So far though, only one side is fighting while the other retreats and surrenders. The opening shots? They could have been fired in 2017 in Alexandria, Virginia with Steve Scalise as the first casualty. It could have been elsewhere. I will leave that to the historians.
In the 60’s, the anti-war activists used to ask “What if they threw a war and no one came?”
What we are now seeing is what happens when they throw a war and only one side shows up.
Will the right show up? If so, will it be in time to matter? Or are we seeing the end of the American experiment?
Only time will tell, and times are interesting these days.
No. We are patiently waiting and watching as these idiots start to see what happens when you let the woke and aggrieved mob are given free reign over their neighborhoods. De-Police? Go For IT!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/minneapolis-george-floyd-police.html
Powder Horn Park is about to see the beast up close and personal. They refuse to see, learn, and think for themselves. Let the Mob rub their faces in it. Maybe, just maybe, then they will learn, but I really doubt it.
Let the bodies drop.
Let the garbage, shit, and needles spread across the parks, streets, and sidewalks.
Let the stealing and burglaries total up.
Let the rapes and assaults happen.
If they are too stupid to protect themselves, let them be victims.
I have no tears for the stupid.
I just wish they would not subject their children to their own insanity.
(I have family that lives a dozen and a half blocks from these fools.)
Ah, the age-old security blanket of “It can’t happen here.”
Yes. Yes, it can.
Unfortunately, so many people refuse to see that fact until it actually happens here (for their personal definition of “here”).
Like most historical figures, Francis Scott Key is more nuanced than simple good/bad.
Yes, he owned slaves, some of whom he purchased himself (i.e. he wasn’t just “born into a slave-owning family”). But at some point he became convinced that slavery is evil and freed his slaves (one continued to work for him as a paid farm foreman). As a lawyer, he represented slave owners seeking the return of their slaves, but he also represented freed slaves who wanted to remain free. As Attorney General, he attacked abolitionists, but later became an ardent abolitionist and convinced others that slavery is wrong.
Personally, I think it shows much more character and humility for one to accept that his personal beliefs were wrong, correct themselves, and become a force for good. As has been observed, for example, “There’s no anti-communist like a former communist.”
However, today’s activists will attack a person for ever having been wrong about anything, regardless of the personal cost of correcting themselves, the trials they faced for doing so, or how much good they did afterward.
Today’s activists really bring to my mind the old adage, “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Archer, you’re assuming the activists are simply ignorant or misguided. At one time I was willing to believe that. No longer. Their arguments are an attempt to pull over a snow job, hiding their actual communist goals.