Oh Canada?
This article was first published in the Minden Times in September, 2024.
How do you create a community? By doing something together. Singing, for example.
And what do we most frequently sing together? A national anthem. Which, David Pate says in his recently-published book, The Worst Songs in the World; The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, are ‘designed to bind a tribe.’ But, as he excavates in detail, they are often rife with militarism, sexism and religion that sharply divides the sheep from the goats, the included from the excluded. They serve a purpose when they motivate men to march to their death for love of kind and country, or a sports team to win the everyday facsimiles of war that support billions of dollars of commerce. But are they what is wanted and needed if we aspire to a kinder, gentler, more inclusive world?
Probably not.
Pate holds that human community inevitably includes music, that no gathering takes place without a soundtrack, that owning our musical taste is telling the world something important about who we are – our generation, our lineage, our politics, our personality. And that is why national anthems are something of a political third rail, best left snoozing in the corner rather than dragged out for prolonged and probably hysterical debate about what the persona of our shared country is.
Especially the lyrics. Because music can be rendered in a multitude of ways that significantly change the message. Pate, in one of hundreds of fascinating factoidal tidbits that you didn’t know would enrich your understanding of the world, tells the story of José Feliciano playing The Star Spangled Banner like a folk ballad, which seemed like treason to a sector of the population who strongly aligned with the usual militaristic interpretation. Or Jimmy Hendrix, at Woodstock, who played the American anthem with a militarism that indicted the Vietnam War.
But the lyrics – which most of us mumble through with little thought, or maybe even mouth mutely – are harder to manipulate. And while the most common excuse for leaving them as they are and forgiving their political incorrectness is that they’re old and venerable is almost certainly not true. They are in most cases a quite recent acquisition, in large part to keep up with the Joneses, specifically to prepare for athletes to take the podium at the Olympics. Pate says, “National anthems are the neckties of a nation’s symbols – no one really knows what they are for or why they became important, but if you don’t have one, then you won’t be allowed into polite society.”
In 2010 Canadian Senator Nancy Ruth succeeded in having a vague intention to reconsider the gendered phrasing in Oh Canada actually included in Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s throne speech (you wonder if there was a bit of scheming afoot there…). It took Prime Minister Steven Harper two days to report “We offered to hear from Canadians on this issue and they have already spoken loud and clear. They overwhelmingly do not wish to open the issue. The Government will not proceed any further to change our national anthem.”
Of course this is not what happened. The women persevered – the change they wanted was two words: for ‘in all our sons command’ to be changed to ‘in all of us command’. The women commenced a ‘sing it the new way anyway’ grassroots movement which kept a focus on the issue. Liberal backbencher Mauril Bélanger brought in a private member’s bill in 2014 which was defeated by the Harper government. But the Trudeau government finally negotiated the change in 2018, missing Canada’s 150th birthday by a year, and too late for Bélanger, who died of ALS in 2016.
The conniptions that people went through to block this momentous change of two words in our anthem are hilarious and pathetic. I’ll share more details at a launch of David Pate’s book that will take place at the Dominion Hotel at 5 pm on October 10th, co-sponsored by the Arts Council ~ Haliburton Highland and the University of King’s College MFA program in Creative Non-Fiction. David was my colleague in the MFA cohort that graduated in May 2023; he was the first among our tight-knit group of aspiring writers to sell his manuscript, the first to survive the throes of getting the book sold to a publisher and through the jigs and reels required to prepare it for the press. And then he died, early and unexpectedly. So a cadre of colleagues from coast to coast is helping to introduce his book into the world as it deserves by creating launch events: the Minden event is one of these.
National Anthems: why should you care? You needn’t, but you will if you read even the footnotes of this delightfully written excavation of a topic you didn’t know was fascinating.
