but leave Irving alone!
by David Benjamin
“Seconds before… ‘God Bless America’… police officers, security guards and ushers turn their backs to the American flag in center field, stare at fans moving through the stands and ask them to stop… ushers stand every 20 feet to block the main aisle with chains.”
— New York Times, 10 May ‘07
MADISON, Wis. — Since time immemorial, whenever we go to a baseball, football, hoops game, soccer match, boxing bout, NASCAR race — every bread-and-circus spectacle native to the American appetite — the corporations who own the teams (or fund the school systems involved) make us stand up, take off our hats and tolerate the coerced, love-it-or-leave it performance of a parody written by a Baltimore lawyer whose lifelong cause was shipping Negroes back to Africa.
OK, fine. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a tradition that dates back to the 1918 World Series, with sporadic outbreaks before that. I prefer not to define patriotism as the ritual effort to drone out a militaristic dirge that most people can’t sing because it covers one and a half larynx-straining octaves between “Oh, say” and “the brave.” But I dutifully doff my cap and hum a few dissonant bars of “Jailhouse Rock” while the band, the color guard, and the daughter of the stadium organ-player strut and fret their 90 seconds on the infield and then are heard no more (mainly because the Blue Angels just came roaring over the ballpark like Slim Pickens in a crippled B-52).
But then, after 11 September 2001, ballpark music ganged aglae. The widely despised Baseball Commissioner, Bud Selig, commanded that every Major League audience had to stop and endure Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. Yes, the seventh-inning stretch, when the most profoundly American, and patriotic, and FUN thing anyone could do — until 9/11 —was stand up, keep their hats on, wave at the TV cameras and sing, about baseball!
“Take me out to the ballgame,
“Take me out with the crowd…”
Thankfully, Selig eventually withdrew his edict, freeing all but the most jingoistic team owners to return the seventh-inning stretch to its joyous, non-partisan, non-sectarian, easily sung appeal for “peanuts and Cracker Jack.” But bad ideas don’t die easily. In his zeal to prove that he loved America more than the Red Sox do, George Steinbrenner ordered “God Bless America” to be sung in the midst of every seventh inning at Yankee Stadium, apparently forever. Enforcement featured fan confinement, chains, threatened expulsion, and a steely-eyed cadre of Special Forces recruited from the stop-and-frisk ranks of the NYPD.
In George’s empire, the troops weren’t just marching around the baseball diamond with flags. They were in the stands, maintaining order and locking down the urinals ‘til they heard the magic words, “…my home sweet home.”
If Orwell had been a baseball fan, the Oceania Nine would have had a seventh-inning stretch something like the Steinbrenner version.
Of course, in the spirit of keeping up with the Joneses, other teams, besides the damn Yankees, continue to force God — and every fan, whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic or pagan — to remove His hat, hold His hand over His heart, holster His Heineken, hold His water and bless America (under the assumption that God’s got nothing better to do in a world where 18,000 children die every day of malaria) in the middle of the seventh. Of course, Irving Berlin’s oversung non-anthem has becomes obligatory during the World Series, when every corporation in America pays a million a minute to sell beer, cars, insurance and four-hour erections while trumpeting their loyalty to “the land that they love” (which is not — let’s not get carried away here — the same one where they stash their profits).
Really, I love the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, not to mention the Coast Guard and the Brownie Scouts. It’s great fun to see them trampling around Fenway Park and Budweiser Field in desert camouflage, going hut-hut-hut, presenting arms snappily and singing about mountains and prairies and “oceans white with foam.”
But there it is! Don’t you see the problem? Oceans white with foam? Really? Irving Berlin needed a rhyme for “home” and all he could think of was “foam?” Come on, man! He was better than that. Hell, even I can do better. How about:
“… from the oceans, to the mountains, to the prairies, deep with loam…”
Or this:
“… from the mountains to the prairies, from the Southland up to Nome…”
Or even:
“… from the oceans, to the mountains, to the skies where eagles roam…”
OK, all that arduous rhyming just took me five minutes. Which tells me Irving didn’t even waste that much time on “God Bless America.” You think he tossed off “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” as lazily as that? Or “Dancing Cheek to Cheek?” In “Easter Parade,” the guy managed to rhyme “rotogravure,” for cryin’ out loud. All I’m saying is that “GBA” is not Irving’s best work. In fact, it’s embarrassing.
We can still love America. We can still believe in world conquest with our vast corporate military-industrial complex as we exploit all those loyal dumb kids goose-stepping around the ballpark in their desert camo. But we owe it to Irving Berlin, perhaps our greatest songwriter, to mothball “God Bless America.” Irving, obviously, didn’t take it seriously. The fact that George Steinbrenner loved the silly song is no reason for all of us to tag along behind his xenophobic example. Besides, the Yanks didn’t even make the playoffs this year, and George is dead.
Which also applies to Irving Berlin. So, how about we all lighten up, go back to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and let the guy rest in peace.
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