Do we need the national anthem at sports events?

San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Bruce Jenkins makes a suggestion that might have been taboo without a pandemic and a racial reckoning. He reports what he has seen:

It’s time to stop playing the national anthem at every sporting event

... Nobody’s more aware of the anthem and its fading relevance than those who have covered baseball on a daily basis for eight months. Scanning the press box and field-level seats in pre-pandemic times, you might see a few people singing, or pressing a hand to the heart. Mostly you see those who are merely tolerating the exercise. Cynical types take note of a performance lasting way too long, or perhaps they just head to the bathroom — anything but stand there and endure what usually amounts to a mediocre rendition.

I once heard someone mutter, “We know what damn country we’re in. Get on with it.”

Exactly. Jenkins informs me that the song wasn't officially adopted until 1931, though the lyrics derive from the War of 1812 -- a war that actually was a losing martial enterprise. In that conflict, the U.S. lucked out that the Brits got busy fighting Napoleon and didn't finish punishing their former colony.

Fortunately, the combination of playing in quarantine bubbles and George Floyd's murder has freed up the Black athletes without whom most professional sports wouldn't exist to express themselves -- and the hell with what their "owners" and Donald Trump might like.

Personally, I've avoided standing for the anthem since the Vietnam war. Recurrent military adventures have disconnected what patriotic impulses I feel from flag or armed forces, while the worst of our impulses have been appropriated to imperial projects.

Mass singing will probably be discouraged for a long time in response to the coronavirus. If we have to have a national song, how about substituting America the Beautiful? It's author, Katharine Lee Bates, was one of those 19th century independent women whose affectionate relationships might later have been called either lesbian or bi-sexual, so that pleases me. Her lyric and her identity feel a good antidote the martial masculine appropriation of love of country.