It is militaristic and bellicose. We celebrate bombs and war and fighting and death and destruction, and all that wrapped in fake news. Actual fake news.

Then there are those later verses. The American Revolution was fought, in part, to maintain the ongoing attempt to take all the Native American lands beyond the mountains, and to maintain slavery. The British were pro-Native, anti-Slavery, so the Patriots rose up and complained. Colonial Americans who expressed a more pro British view, which was also by default a more pro-Native and anti-slavery view, were brought into the town squares and tortured, sometimes killed. Their homes were destroyed and the books or pamphlets they wrote to support their views were burned unceremoniously.

When the War of 1812 happened, which was a land grab by the US, the British offered the slaves in the American South the opportunity to leave the US, and without condition be taken away by British boats. They were offered transport to wherever they wanted to go, and if they chose, to settle in new colonies in the Caribbean (the Merkins of Trinidad) or other British colonies (the “Black Refugees” of the War of 1812). They were also given the opportunity to fight the land grabbing Americans. Many did take up that offer. More tried but their attempts thwarted. Bad things happened to those who were caught.

In the Star Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key notes that “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” There is more than one way to take that, but it is generally considered at least an admonishment to slaves who would seek freedom with the British, if not an out and out death threat.

So, the Star Spangled Banner celebrates the same old thing that had been going on since before the end of the Revolution. Senseless bellicose jingoism in favor of human bondage. So, screw the Star Spangled Banner. I want nothing to do with it.

Then, on top of that, it sucks as a song and is hard to sing.

Well, everything is hard to sing for me, but I mean even for actual singers.

And, now we have this other thing. If you question the Star Spangled Banner, like Colin Kaepernick did, you may be subject to attacks by White Supremacists such as Donald Trump. And, if you perform it in a way that is not in line with tradition, you are despised for that.

(I quickly add, some performances of the SSB are just plain stupid, like the one by Rosanne, who herself is a big giant asshole. And, for those of you who don’t know, for years singers were famous for very often forgetting the words at major sports games, but that seems to have stopped.)

There are two versions of the SSB, however, that sound pretty darn good. Both are hated by all the usual haters, so that makes them extra good. I have them for you here.

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock:

Fergie at the2018 NBA All-Star game:

Anybody who does not like at least one of these two is not a patriot and needs to hustle on back to Communist Russia where they were born, dammit!!!

Specifically, the individual, commenting on a the flag story on a local news site, said:

Now, this particular joker was trying to say that there were lots of white people who “may as well have been slaves” in the North, or words to that effect. That is of course absurd because while there might have been (and later in history certainly was) a lot of exploitation of workers and poor and such, nobody was being owned, bred, treated like animals with the full force of the law, etc. Anyway, I found others making similar claims and claims and apparently some folks actually think that slavery was widespread in both the North and South.

Here are the data from the 1860 US Census, the census that measures the distribution of slaves at the start of the Civil War.

And I made a pie chart just for fun:

So now you know.

Why was the Civil War fought?

This is “Confederate Heritage and History Month” so it is a good time to talk about the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over slavery. I don’t have anything else to say about that right now, but my friend John McKay has written a lengthy blog post explaining this. Have a look: It’s Treason Appreciation Month

the Civil War was indeed fought to end slavery.

Your average teabagger probably thinks that the American Civil War was not fought to end slavery. I’m guessing that they subscribe to one of those revisionist versions of American History in which the Civil War was about something else and slavery had nothing to do with it. That idea always perplexed me until now. Now, because of comments made by Michele Bachmann last week I understand that they don’t link the Civil War to slavery because they think that the institution of slavery was ended by the Founding Fathers.

Lat week, Bachmann said: “”we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” ”

What an idiot.

Anderson Cooper responds to this and other remarks made by Michele The Moron Bachman:

John Quincy Adams worked tirelessly to what???? Hey, Slavery ended in the United States after it ended in any other Western country. We were the slavery country, and later, we became the Jim Crow country.

And now, sadly, we’re the Teabagging country. We’re doomed.

Hat tip to my friend Aseem Nevrekar, who knows more about American History than any teabagger and he’s not even an American! Which does not surprise me.