By David K. Shipler
One day in
the summer of 1960, just 15 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, a tour bus
of Americans, driving through the Netherlands, broke into song, led by a
seminary student in the group. It was an old Methodist hymn, Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken, in a
beautiful Haydn melody.
Suddenly
the driver, a Dutchman named Jerry, shouted at us to stop, please stop. He had
to pull over, he was so upset. We fell silent, baffled, until he explained that
we were singing the melody of the German national anthem, whose lyrics in
Weimar and then Nazi times began, “Deutschland,
Deutschland uber alles/ Uber alles in
der Welt,” (“Germany, Germany above all/ Above everything in the world”).
Jerry had seen the German tanks and troops roll into Amsterdam. He had seen
people hanged from lampposts. By singing that tune, even as a hymn, we were unwittingly
sweeping him back into the war.
For me, at 17, this was a moment of clarity
about the innocence of my parochialism, the indelible memories of suffering, and
the power of patriotic music. It was a sudden education in the vast symbolic
force of national anthems. Like the pieces of colored cloth sewn together into national
flags of fierce identity, the arrangements of notes and words can compute into something
far greater than the sum of their parts.
So it is that we now see Colin
Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, reviled and applauded as
he stays seated or takes a knee instead of standing for The Star Spangled Banner. He is protesting what all good citizens
should: police shootings of unarmed black men and the country’s stubborn
scourge of racism. If he had only made a speech, fine. But failing to respect
the national anthem, well, that’s heresy!
