Due to popular demand

"What are the last two words of the national anthem? Play ball!" - old joke

I’ll bet you’re a fan of The Simpsons if you’re reading this because there are maybe five chunks of pop culture I engage with that make me tolerable to others. What for me makes the show most important is the way that even some of its throwaway lines have embedded into my brain to the point where I reflexively associate them with aspects of everyday life. I can’t hear or read someone describe someone or something as “the ___ from hell” without saying aloud, “You mean Cerberus?”

And ever since I first saw the episode “The Homer They Fall” in which Homer Simpson faces off against the Mike Tyson parody Drederick Tatum, the way I consume a certain part of sporting events on TV or in person has been changed. Before the animated fight, legendary ring emcee Michael Buffer says the following:

If I’m watching a game on TV and the anthem is being broadcast, I say that out loud. (If I’m attending a game, I just think or mumble it because most strangers nearby are not like you and me.) The Simpsons of my youth always had its finger on the unspoken but popular demands of American silliness.

This week the North American sporting world was abuzz with video of–gasp–Canadians booing the American anthem following the President of the TV decided to wreck multiple economies by enacting a 25% tariff on goods coming in from Canada and Mexico. It was only after Canada conceded to the theater of combatting the fentanyl trafficking that doesn’t exist at that border that POTVS temporarily backed off. Temporarily.

Canadians, those overly quiet and polite upstairs neighbors who gave us Letterkenny and tolerate the hell out of our constant ruckus, have every right to be cheesed. It’s one thing to watch America shoot itself in the foot (literally a lot) by reaping what the Facebook-brain-rot electorate sewed and have a good laugh after the American who wants to be king suggested he could have Canada absorbed into the States, but then he went and enacted genuine harm to our allies’ pocketbooks, too. 

So they did the nastiest thing a Canadian could do–boo your precious song before hockey games and a Raptors game. This of course then led to the wildly uncreative response in Nashville of booing the Canadian anthem before a Predators game against the Ottawa Senators. Nothing like pulling a “I know you are, but what am I” after your own government takes a dump in the neighbor’s kitchen sink to really solidify the brutish reputation we have abroad. 

Fanatic, boo thyself.

The ceremony of playing a country’s anthem prior to multi-millionaires competing at the highest level comes off as especially weird if enough people are booing during it. A bad look that is supposed to be saved for an appearance by the league commissioner. And then Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman had a thought on his podcast:

“If they start booing the Canadian anthem as well, especially in the United States, I wonder if anyone's going to say we should stop playing the visiting anthem.”

Why stop with just the visiting anthem, though? 

What is the point of the anthem at regular-season sporting events, really? It started as a specifically patriotic response during WWI–when “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t even the country’s national anthem yet. We tend to forget that there are living Americans older than the country having an anthem. But playing it wasn’t a ritual at every game back then, just at special occasions. It wasn’t until NFL commissioner Elmer Layden mandated playing it at every game during WW2 but then to also continue to do so after the war concluded that the tradition stuck. 

And those were particularly uber-patriotic times, active players serving overseas, the military industrial complex embryonic. Playing a song harkening back to another war was understandable, as was, at the respective times, the extra emphasis around the song during the first foray into Iraq and the spike in anything remotely patriotic in the aftermath of 9/11. (Both really cringy now with the benefit of hindsight and actual journalism!)

But those were times when the pro sporting event-attending segments of the country were largely united (discounting most Black folks during the world wars and Muslim-Americans during the early 2000s). The anthem, for better or worse, added to the common feeling of hating a foreign enemy. Canada ain’t that.

We’re not living in such unified times. Much the opposite really. The enemy for many Americans is within the U.S. boundaries, sometimes on the same block or at the same dinner table, and it’s the fellow American who didn’t vote for the rabid R or D team. The political divisions are toxic in this country and only growing worse as, just as you read this, five more affronts to the political fabric happened at the federal level that would have made for bad airport novel fodder a decade ago.

What a wonderful opportunity to move on from a tradition that no longer fits the culture, a practice mocked back in 1996 by The Simpsons for its illogical hollowness, if not absurdity. 

Let’s walk through the thought process here: before a particular type of live entertainment, we have to perform a specific song. About the War of 1812. Written by a slaveowner. With a lyric that we don’t acknowledge anymore that threatens escaped enslaved people. That doesn’t rhyme mostly. That is notoriously difficult to sing. Because tradition.

Anybody remember reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in high school and how the story is about a collective savage killing but actually is about something else? 

Oh, but it shows love for your country, one might say. Does it really? Most people in attendance are standing and silent out of obligation to a conditioned decorum than sense of patriotism. The larger TV audience isn’t participating in the ceremony of it. The song isn’t part of non-sports entertainment outlets. It’d be off-putting to have the anthem start playing and have to stand during the coming attractions in the movie theater or right before a Broadway show. And outside of sports, hardly anybody who hasn’t been flagged by some security agency has “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the brain during any other point in the course of their day. Nobody actively cares about the song until someone able-bodied isn’t standing in reverence during its playing before sports (and even then you get a pass if you’re in the middle of a transaction at a concession stand because, well, nachos and beer, right?). It’s not part of anyone’s regular Spotify shuffle. It was never the ringtone of anyone but the most-divorced uncles. Its sanctity exists just before sports, inexplicably.

If the anthem is no longer played before games (and let’s certainly include “God Bless America” on the “To Remove” list as well), what changes about the experience? 

There are other ways to show love for country. Perhaps fighting for health care for everyone or working to fight climate change before it drowns or burns more people to death or using one’s position to stop the Constitution from being used as a bib while a bunch of gamers turn Democracy into a personal Golden Corral. That sort of love of country, ya know, which eschews indifference.

Major events that would still include the anthem are fine. The Olympics is duh. The performance in the Super Bowl pregame is now an event within an event. But to have it required before an August tilt between the Pirates and Reds? What is that accomplishing besides giving a high school glee club some shine?

One thing that the American collective is really good at that it doesn’t get enough credit for is an aggressive indifference. Tough luck on your problems, maybe here’s a donation for you, but otherwise leave us alone–the game’s on. If just one major pro franchise decided that the anthem was no longer necessary, it would create a brief stir, some politicians would make it their distraction du jour, and then folks would default to that indifference, caring just about starting the damn game they’ve gambled on with their phones. 

I noticed that TNT didn’t air the pregame anthems before Wednesday night’s Blackhawks-Oilers game–not sure if this is typical for those national broadcasts or not, but there was no reaction to the omission. Because indifference, you might say, is the American popular demand.