The Try-Works

As anyone who’s turned on a television or radio in the past week knows, there’s a huge brouhaha boiling over jazz singer, Rene Marie’s choice to sing the so-called Black National Anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” instead of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Denver Mayor’s address to the city last week.  Ms. Marie has since enjoyed the kind of racial invective usually reserved for American Indians in our fair cowtown, prompting moral morons Mayor Hickenlooper and Governor Ritter to publicly condemn her.

After a day of measured responses, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper on Wednesday issued a sharply worded rebuke of a singer who replaced the words of the national anthem with lyrics from another song before a Hickenlooper speech.

Reading from a prepared statement beneath gathering afternoon clouds on the steps of the City and County Building, a visibly angry Hickenlooper said the singer’s actions overshadowed what he wanted to convey in his Tuesday morning speech.

The annual state of the city address is the mayor’s biggest speech of the year and sets the agenda for the course of city government in the coming year.

“No one paid attention to that speech,” said Hickenlooper, who said that he had spent at least 72 hours preparing
the speech and that his staff had spent weeks preparing for the event.

Instead, the mayor said, his office had been deluged with angry telephone calls and e-mails. At least 80 people had expressed displeasure Wednesday with Rene Marie’s song choice Tuesday.

The local jazz singer and actress, who had been invited to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner,” instead sang a song recalling the life-threatening conditions slaves were forced to endure in the 19th century called “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The song, which Marie sang to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is also called the “black national anthem.”

. . .

Other politicians also were weighing in. Speaking during his monthly appearance on the “Mike Rosen Show” on 850 KOA on Wednesday, Gov. Bill Ritter said the performance had been “inappropriate.”

“If you invite someone to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at an event, you invite them to do just that,” Ritter said.

“The problem here is she was invited to do one thing, and she chose to do another thing,” Ritter said.

“It’s a fair interpretation to say it’s disrespectful.”

The mayor had used much milder language the day of his speech. He said then that Marie had apologized and told him she meant no disrespect.

On Wednesday, he said he had grown angrier after watching televised interviews of the singer. It became clear, he said, that she “was making a political statement.”

He said that while he thinks the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” are beautiful, it wasn’t appropriate to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” during an official city function.

“‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is sacred, one of our most beloved traditions,” the mayor said.

Keep reading.

One of our “most beloved traditions” you say?  Well, maybe, but sure as hell not one of mine.  See, unlike the geniuses inhabiting our City and State office buildings, I know something about the history of “The Star Spangled Banner’s” adoption as the national anthem.  After all, the key proponents were none other than two of my favorite exterminationist confidence men, Buffalo Bill Cody and Theodore Roosevelt.

Cody, the most dedicated mover, played the tune for some thirty years to kick off his Wild West, an outdoor drama which began as a series of corny New York plays about himself, based on dime novel fantasies penned by the likes of Prentiss Ingraham, and grew into a global phenomenon.

Buffalo Bill never let his Wild West be called the Wild West Show, insisting the that what was being presented was no mere representation of the Wild West, but the Wild West itself.  And, in at least one regard, Cody was correct to insist on its authenticity: the show presented the march of Manifest Destiny as the historical inevitability which has formed the core of American Indian-Hating and Empire-Building ever since.  The spectacle opened with the forest primeval, complete with savages skulking through the underbrush, and led the viewer through the so-called civilization of America, depicting, as Richard Slotkin put it in Gunfighter Nation, “the struggle between Red Man and White on the American frontier [as] the archetype and precedent for the world-wide struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘savage’ or ‘regressive’ races that shaped the modern world.”

Or, as Cody put it in the Wild West’s handbill:

The central figure in these pictures is that of THE HON. W.F. CODY (Buffalo Bill), to whose sagacity, skill, energy, and courage . . . the settlers of the West owe so much for the reclamation of the prairie from the savage Indian and wild animals, who so long opposed the march of civilization.

Although one has to wonder at the logical contortions inherent to any claim of an Anglo-American right to “reclaim” the prairie from its original inhabitants, the handbill couldn’t be clearer about the racist assumptions of this particular confidence game.  Unlike the later softening of the winning of the American West that has come with more politically correct sensibilities, Cody’s Wild West wasn’t a place of cultural exchange, where Indians simply vanished before the oncoming civilization; it was unabashed in its worship of the cult of extermination.

Not that, for all his insistence on historical accuracy, Cody was particularly vested in the principle.  He was a confidence man.  My favorite example of Cody’s chicanery comes with George Armstrong Custer’s etiquette lesson at Greasy Grass.  At the time, Buffalo Bill was nominally employed as a scout for the 5th Cavalry, taking a break from his career of play-acting himself in an attempt to bolster his authenticity.  Hence, a few weeks after Custer’s defeat, the 5th Cavalry scouts, led by Cody, hunted down a party of Cheyenne who had nothing to do with Custer’s defeat, and butchered them.  Cody then scalped one of the corpses and proclaimed it the “first scalp for Custer.”

As Richard Slotkin notes, again in Gunfighter Nation, this incident became “the core of the Buffalo Bill legend, and the basis for his national celebrity.  Before the year was over he would be hailed as the man who took the first scalp for Custer,” and in only a few months time, Cody had already translated the skirmish into a play entitled The Red Right Hand; Or, The First Scalp for Custer.  In the play, Cody’s battle with the Cheyenne warrior, Yellow Hand, mutated into a hand-to-hand duel, with Cody holding the scalp above his head and shouting the line, “The First Scalp for Custer!”  Yellow Hand himself was transformed into a prominent Cheyenne war-chief, who had been present at the Little Big Horn.

Even better, it seems that Buffalo Bill anticipated the massacre by donning a black and scarlet velvet Vaquero outfit on the morning of the murder in lieu of his usual buckskins, allowing him to later stand on stage in the East, declaring truthfully that he stood before the audience in the very garb he was wearing when he took the first scalp for Custer.

Nor was that the end of it.  Yellow Hand’s scalp was displayed on advertisements for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for the entirety of its run, and Buffalo Bill himself played Custer in the culmination to his show for decades.

In fact, besides “The Star Spangled Banner”, the murdered Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hand’s scalp was the most consistent feature of the Wild West.

There’s a continuity there that one really needn’t bother remark on.

So how’s about Roosevelt?  Well, Roosevelt is widely understood as having inaugurated the movement which led to “The Star Spangled Banner’s” becoming the national anthem.  And he fell in love with it at Cody’s Wild West.  He was generally impressed with the historical lesson Cody provided, but was particularly moved by the swell of feeling given him and the audience by the playing of the song.  So moved, that he had his volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders — who took their name from a portion of Cody’s Wild West entitled “The Congress of the Rough Riders of the World” — play the tune when they hoisted the first American flag in Cuba.

And it gets better.  See, when Roosevelt returned, Cody replaced the closing act of his Wild West, wherein he played a courageous General George Armstrong Custer, with a reenactment of the Battle of San Juan Hill, wherein he played a courageous Teddy Roosevelt, leading his Rough Riders in their famous charge.  (A famous charge which, it’s worth remembering, was essentially a mop-up operation, as a black cavalry regiment had already taken care of most of the combat.)

Cody understood what Roosevelt understood, and that was that the invasion of Cuba was US Indian policy on the road.  It was, and is, the kind of militaristic racial expansionism which they both recognized in “The Star Spangled Banner”.

Am I being too hard on Roosevelt, calling him an exterminationist and a racial expansionist?

Well, don’t take my word for it.  Following are some quotes from his four-volume Indian-killing, expansionist epic, The Winning of the West (which was plagiarized by no less a racial expansionist than Adolf Hitler):

During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance . . . There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion — as distinguished from mere conquest, — but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid.

. . .

Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghanies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of savages, war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and had we refrained from encroaching on the Indians’ lands, the war would have come nevertheless, for then the Indians themselves would have encroached on ours.

. . .

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.

. . .

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.

. . .

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

. . .

Yet the very causes which render this struggle between savagery and the rough front rank of civilization so vast and elemental in its consequence to the future of the world, also tend to render it in certain ways peculiarly revolting and barbarous. It is primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and of iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality. The armies are neither led by trained officers nor made up of regular troops–they are composed of armed settlers, fierce and wayward men, whose ungovernable passions are unrestrained by discipline, who have many grievous wrongs to redress, and who look on their enemies with a mixture of contempt and loathing, of dread and intense hatred. When the clash comes between these men and their somber foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of indescribable horror. It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.

. . .

Yet in its results, and viewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind. It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable. Huge tomes might be filled with arguments as to the morality or immorality of such conquests. But these arguments appeal chiefly to the cultivated men in highly civilized communities who have neither the wish nor the power to lead warlike expeditions into savage lands. Such conquests are commonly undertaken by those reckless and daring adventurers who shape and guide each race’s territorial growth. They are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with a weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.

Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples. It is useless to try to generalize about conquests simply as such in the abstract; each case or set of cases must be judged by itself. The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar. This is true generally of the victories of barbarians of low racial characteristics over gentler, more moral, and more refined peoples, even though these people have, to their shame and discredit, lost the vigorous fighting virtues. Yet it remains no less true that the world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should of necessity be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people. That they are in truth birth-pangs does not lessen the grim and hopeless woe of the race supplanted; of the race outworn or overthrown. The wrongs done and suffered cannot be blinked. Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has been achieved.

Sigh, nothing like reading Teddy to get that old Teutonic blood flowing.  Gee, wonder why people of color might feel a tad bit, shall we say, alienated by that kind of horseshit?

Anyway, to be honest, my opposition to “The Star Spangled Banner” has very little to do with Cody or Roosevelt.  It has to do with it being a monstrously stupid piece of hammer-rhyme hackwork.

But, that aside, there’s something particularly fucking repellent about all those talk-show clones on the local channels getting worked up about Rene Marie’s statement that she never felt “The Star Spangled Banner” applied to her.

I don’t think the song in itself is racist — just fucking awful — but, in the same way that there are survivors of Nazi concentration camps who’d rather not listen to Wagner, one can certainly understand Ms. Marie’s desire to sing something else.