I've returned from a long a lovely train trip to Denver, one of adopted hometowns (and what a stunning job they've done with Union Station and LoDo). So I was blessedly off the grid during the latest culture-war battle, over standing or kneeling for the national anthem. At the risk of losing friends among right-thinking people, I am torn about this.
On the one hand, protest has a long history in sports and if one or many of the pro-football millionaires wants to kneel to protest racism, that's his prerogative. Jehovah's Witnesses don't stand. For the players, I'm not sure it's a First Amendment right. I can't write anything I want as a Seattle Times columnist. To be sure, my masters give me wide latitude but there is an invisible fence. I am an employee. Nobody thought my First Amendment Rights were being trampled when the Arizona Republic took away my column because my writings offended the boosters and Real Estate Industrial Complex. Let's also state at the outset that the quisling in the Oval Office has no standing to lecture on anyone's patriotism.
Yet I also couldn't shake two other impressions. First, beyond the symbolism, can anything make amends? What would it take? Even on police shootings of unarmed black men, I have yet to see journalism to tell me whether this is worse now than in, say, the 1960s. It's bad no matter what, but are things getting better as President Obama, who may be remembered as the last American president, said? Or not? This question is beyond my aim today. Second, can't we have any modest civic above politic war, such as standing for the national anthem? We once had a common culture that assumed such things, for all our flaws. I won't even ask if it's a given to stand during the "Hallelujah" chorus. On the anthem, the answer is apparently, no.
On Facebook, my friend Tom Zoellner, one of the smartest people I know, wrote:
Historical reminder: "The Star-Spangled Banner" was a baroque nationalist poem written by a lawyer who helped slaveowners recapture their escaped property. In the third verse (almost always unsung) a line celebrates the murder of African-Americans slaves who had been recruited to fight for their freedom on the British side in the War of 1812. Here's the line: "No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave"
We don't just need to take a knee. We need to look honestly at our history, make hard amends for our national sin of racism, stop trying to pretend this festering wound doesn't exist, and make the USA live up to the sacred ideals implicit in its founding, even though their implementation has been messy, imperfect and painful over the course of 241 years.
