“God Bless America,” or Goddamn America?

By Nicholas Stix

I just turned the sound back on, on World Series game 2. I’d had to hit the mute button during the seventh inning stretch, because my ears were about to bleed.

A youngish female, wearing the dress uniform of the U.S. Army, was allegedly singing. The public address announcer told people to doff their caps, which is inappropriate, because “God Bless America” is not the “National Anthem”; it has no official status. The announcer identified the female as a “veteran,” who is now involved in Army intelligence and psy ops, if I recall correctly, but somehow I doubt she’d seen combat. She looked white, but commenced to ape the worst attributes of contemporary black singers, ridiculously stretching out notes, to the point where the song lost all shape.

Not that it’s much of a song, to begin with. Still, I always stop talking when it is sung, or else sing along, but I don’t treat it like the “National Anthem,” because it isn’t.

I emphasize the woman’s aping of bad black singing habits, because while whites still, more often than not, respect “The National Anthem,” blacks, with rare exception, style all over it. I see this as a form of disrespect, in which blacks deliberately do things in as different a fashion as whites, in order to express their racist contempt for them. (Actually, if memory serves, it was a Puerto Rican racist and anti-American, Jose Feliciano, who first styled his way through “The National Anthem.”) Just like making a point of having children out of wedlock, refusing to obey the law, shouting in places where they’re not supposed to—like a theater during a movie.

I understand what blacks are doing when they show such contempt, and blacks know what they are doing, but I’m not sure that all whites who imitate blacks understand what they’re doing. While some whites may understand that they are being defiantly racist, I suspect that most of them think that whatever obnoxiously racist blacks do is “cool,” and therefore that they too are being cool. Well, if you really want to be cool, walk around saying “nigger” this and “nigger” that, the way all “cool” blacks do all day long.

Whites don’t want to be that cool, because it would violate the Black Rules, and result in racist blacks coming down on them, instead of on other, uncool whites.

And by the way, it’s the World Series. Period. Not “the Fall Classic.” Calling it “the Fall Classic” is hyperbolic, and detracts rather than adds to the original term. I like Tommy Lasorda, and admire the great career he had in baseball as much as the next man, but that does not oblige me to echo the stupid cliché he coined.