The Law of Inverse Anthemics

Now I know that, like me, most of you will have spent yesterday waving red banners on assorted barricades and grimly engaging in international proletarian solidarity. But apparently it was 'Loyalty Day' in the United States. I don't quite know how this would be celebrated; perhaps by anonymously denouncing to John Ashcroft non-churchgoers, Democrats and others manifestly undeserving of life in a free society under limited government. Tom Runnacles has his own thoughts on this, but ends with this amazing bit of contrarian criticism:

Actually, I'm prepared to admit that 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is pretty good as National Anthems go.

Actually, I'm prepared to hypothesise that the S-SB was given the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven by some underground United Empire Loyalist keen on ridiculing the young republic that had dared usurp the King's rightful authority. While visiting America last summer I went to a baseball game, and I must say the anthem sung at the beginning was a prefect complement to the game itself: disjointed, meandering, hard to follow and long. (It was Mencken, I believe, who described the American anthem as 'gibberish sprinkled with question-marks'; but it is the tune, not the text, that concerns me here.)

Mr Runnacles did set me thinking, though. I think the case can be made that the musical quality of a national anthem is in inverse relation to the quality of the nation it praises. I'm not interested for the moment in the ideas an anthem's text expresses, or its emotional value to citizens of the state in question. I'm interested solely in how it sounds. The S-SB is, to my mind, a pretty awful piece of music, yet the USA is (in theoretical constitutional terms) a very good thing indeed and (in real-world practice) for all its faults a decent and successful society. Contrast nazi Germany: dominant member of the real Axis of Evil and one of the very worst things ever. Yet Das Deutschlandlied (you may know it as 'Deutschland über alles') is of ethereal beauty.* The USSR must also rank high on any list of Bad Nations, yet the Gimn sovetskogo soyuza is a great musical achievement, conveying hope and majesty at once. The quiet solemnity of Auferstanden aus Ruinen, the anthem of the former German Democratic Republic, perfectly captured what the First Peace-loving Workers' and Peasants' State on German Soil purported to represent: the better elements of the German nation arising from the ruins to build a just society. (A German friend assures me, though, that the tune was swiped from Good-bye Johnny, a song popular in bordellos.)

My theory breaks down when applied to Ireland, though. Here there is not so much an inverse relation as a lack of any relation whatever. The anthem's music is completely inapposite not to the state but to the anthem itself. Amhran na bhFiann is a jaunty, jolly little tune. But it's supposed to be a martial tune - The Soldier's Song, as it is known in English. If it weren't for its associations, it could easily be played by a loyalist flute band on the Twelfth. Which leads us to another example of the strange inability of the competing Irish tribes to make the tune fit the notion, let alone the nation. Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland see the Orangemen parading through their streets as violent aggressors, asserting their control over the vanquished. Yet the anthem of Orangeism, The Sash My Father Wore, is anything but malevolent. It's a cheerful march, just the thing you'd expect an American high school band to blare out at half-time during the Big Football Match. Perhaps it's for the best that I blow this hole in my theory. Otherwise Iain Murray might be tempted to apply the inverse law to the European Union and its anthem, the chorale from Beethoven's Ninth.

* Happily, the current lot of Germans (who have a much nicer state now) have kept the anthem. But they've deleted the first two verses of the text (including the Deutschland über alles bit). What's left is the wish for 'unity and justice and liberty for the German fatherland'. Even the deleted verses, though, once meant something very different to the meaning Hitler gave them.