Language of the Heart

Today's crisis is the fact that someone has sung the United States' National Anthem in Spanish.

This is such a catastrophe that President Bush took time out of his busy day—and he's very busy these days, what with plummeting approval poll ratings, the fact that twice as many soldiers have been killed in Iraq this month as in March, Karl Rove's imminent indictment for perjury, his second attempt at involving the Saudi-owned Dubai Corporation into our defense infrastructure, and personally helping, with New Orleans Mayor Nagel, to rebuild homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina—he took time out to express his opinion that the National Anthem be sung "only in English."

"One of the things that's very important is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul…I think people who want to be citizens of this country ought to learn English," Bush said.

President Bush's statement ignores the estimated 8.6% of Americans who are deaf, and therefore express the National Anthem (beautifully, I might add) in American Sign Language. It ignores the fact that the National Anthem has for years been sung in the various other languages spoken by our diverse, multi-cultural culture—for example, in Navajo.

As for the "national soul," the music of the National Anthem was borrowed from a British drinking song. And its lyrics never once mention the name of the country. It is, instead, a song celebrating our tenacity in battle. That tenacity was won through the efforts of American soldiers: Some who spoke English, yes, but others whose native language was Navajo, Irish, French, Polish, Bantu, and others. Our "national soul" is the spirit of diversity; and it is President Bush—and others whose prejudices he echoes—who violates that soul by insisting only English-speakers give voice to it.

Singing is a communication of the heart. Regardless of the lyrics or the language in which they are sung, the singing voice expresses what words never can. In the case of the National Anthem, that is the joy of discovering freedom and the triumph of retaining it against all odds. This is not an emotion to which English speakers have copyright.

Meanwhile, in bringing up the issue of "national soul," President Bush misses the fact that we'd already lost our national soul when we discovered our own soldiers have been torturing prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention and our own sense of ethics; that we held such prisoners incommunicado without due process; that our own president had broken the law by listening into our private conversations without warrant. President Bush allows himself to be photographed in New Orleans, hammering nails into a building frame. Why was he there? Does anyone really think that the time of the President of the United States is best spent hammering on the frame of one building when the moral foundation of our nation is falling apart?

That photo is, in fact, a visual lie from an Administration of lies, like the one about Weapons of Mass Destruction that tricked us into attacking Iraq and losing so many American soldiers, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

When a Spanish-speaker sings "Amanece: ¿no veis, a la luz de la aurora," he or she is singing truth. I'd rather have the truth in Spanish, than another lie in English, any day.