Being soccer-mad, I am fairly indifferent to American football, but my wife is a bit of a fan. Thus, in the interests of domestic tranquility, I find myself TV-ed by Super Bowl 50 and, pre-game, I am sweatily apprehensive: Lady Gaga is to deliver the National Anthem! The basis of my concern is that, in recent years, many popular divas have been let loose to lustily disembowel the Star Spangled Banner at many a major event.
Right from Gaga’s opening notes, the dirge-like tempo and her vapid phrasing would have been more than well received at any third-rate, sleazy roadhouse on the outskirts of Hicksville. Predictably, in mid-anthem she sashayed into the obligatory series of trills, yodels, tremolos, hiccups and ga-gargling noises that pre-ordained a crescendo that was an uneven contest between the high notes as written and the liberally over-screeched interpretations by the vocalist.
For a practical example of the respectful vibrancy, the joy and the spirit with which tributes like our National Anthem should be treated, one has only to look no further than the pre-game presentation that preceded Gaga’s. Namely, the Armed Forces Chorus singing America the Beautiful. They believed in what they were singing and it showed! In stark contrast, Gaga's rendition was a shameless egocentric paean to herself. “Look at me, look at me! I'm going to turn this sucker into one of my songs.” Monday’s newspaper gave her a fair amount of doting coverage. One correspondent said “she nailed it,” and AP allowed that the social media was afloat with raves. Naturally, I found no mention of the Armed Forces Chorus in the paper.
So what? Well, I am going to suggest that this kind of willful denigration of our national symbols to tumultuous applause is a metaphor for the extent to which this country has lost its way. We are becoming a country of obsessive social media. A country of blogs, selfies, facebooks, ear-buds, cell phones, nosy cameras, incessant videos, and on and on. The common thread is a focus on the “me.” However, this behavior is only acceptable within strict bounds---the main one being that other vital cultural foundations don’t get ignored and demolished in the process.
