O diga puedale ve?

Which is a rough translation of Oh, say, can you see -- the opening words of the US national anthem. Apparently, some one has recorded a Spanish version of the anthem, entitled Nuestro Himno -- Our Hymn. It's not so much a translation of the original as a statement of solidarity. When I first heard about this, I thought it was literally O Diga Puedale Ve, and I was of the opinion that it ought not to be tolerated. But between then and today, when I found out what it actually was, I changed my mind.

What brought me around was thinking about the notorious flag-burning incidents of the sixties and seventies. There was molten outrage over those events. These people were desecrating a great and noble symbol, one that stood for my country. How dare they? How dare they? But over time I thought -- shallowly, but I thought -- about what it actually meant to be a symbol of something. And I realized that the reason you need a symbol is because the thing being symbolized is difficult, perhaps impossible to see. The spirit of my country could be manifest in many ways, but it could no more be boxed and presented than happiness or anger. The attitude that the burnings illustrated angered me (and truth to tell, still does) but that attitude existed independent of the action. The action was despicable, but it was also ineffectual, because nothing can destroy the American spirit except the American attitude toward that spirit.

It takes away nothing from the spirit and majesty of our nation's anthem (and though I mean that, I say it slightly tongue in cheek, thinking of the British origins) to recognize the spirit of Nuestro Himno. We are no less American because people who are, and are not, American chose a symbol for their solidarity. Yes, there is probably a point where the symbol becomes the point, and not just a symbol, and at that point it would deserve to be defended and its attackers defeated -- but this isn't an attack, and this isn't that point. To say otherwise -- to assume that the symbol is the actuality -- is equivilent to assuming that putting the phrase 'Mission Accomplished' onto a banner is the same as it actually happening.

And we all know how that plays out.