Our anthem carries its own baggage

Christina Aguilera was not the first celebrity to mess up the words of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a sporting event. And take this to the bank: She won't be the last.

Her painfully public memory lapse at the start of the Super Bowl on Sunday raised a lot of questions: Why can't big-name anthem singers put in the time to learn the words? Shouldn't they know them already anyway? Why do they feel compelled to jazz up the original music? Why can't the singing of the anthem be less a performance by one person and more a fervent sing-along by everyone present?

Then there's my question, widely unasked: Why do we sing the anthem at sporting events at all?

We sing it before the first pitch is thrown, before the first puck is dropped, before the opening tipoff. But we don't sing it before a Broadway play, an opera, a ballet or an evening of improv comedy. So, what is it about sports that makes us need to express our patriotism at the start?

These are not questions I'd have asked in 1968, when I was an intelligence officer at a tactical missile base in Korea, or in 1980, when the U.S. Olympic hockey team scored an improbable victory over what was then the Soviet Union. Though I'm not much of a hockey fan, I found it thrilling to watch the gritty underdog triumph. And I remember getting a little misty-eyed during the playing of the national anthem at the medal ceremony.

In fact, I didn't begin to focus on issues of flags and anthems until I walked into a funeral parlor viewing room for the wake of my younger brother, Richie.

He died, alone in his apartment in Queens, at age 36, in 1983. Gradually, in the weeks that followed, I became convinced that his exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 led to his death. But at the time of the wake, I was just feeling anger at the government for sending him off to that misbegotten war.

So, when I saw the flag neatly folded on his coffin, I didn't experience it as a token of honor for a deceased veteran or as a consolation for our family's loss, but as a vivid reminder of the madness of the Vietnam War. So I took the flag off the coffin and put it in a nearby closet - not exactly pleasing my family.

Since then, I've evolved a little protest about my brother's death: At ballgames, I stand for the national anthem, out of respect to those around me. But I don't sing. And, if I can, I arrange to be out of my seat and on line at the concession stand, along with others not singing.

In time, as I evolved from gung-ho lieutenant to pacifist, I paid more attention to the warlike words of the anthem, and the slave-owning background of its author, Francis Scott Key. As a lawyer, he defended both slave owners and freed slaves, but he also prosecuted an abolitionist. It's a mixed biography on race, but it makes his ringing phrase, "land of the free," sound less than authentic.

So, if we must sing a national anthem at sporting events, why not one that extols our nation's unchangeable natural beauty, and not its wars? "America the Beautiful" would be better. Whatever mischief the government may be up to, we all love Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and the Adirondack Park, to name a few. I'd prefer "This Is My Song," to the tune of Jean Sibelius' "Finlandia." It's about peace, and it acknowledges the beauties of other nations, as well as our own.

OK, I'm not placing any bets on a change of national anthem. But you won't lose money if you bet that some future celebrity will get the words wrong. There's one way to make sure that the inevitable error won't upset you when it comes blaring through your TV: Do what I do, and just don't listen.