Patriotism, politics, and the national anthem

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Who says politics have to be grim and boring? When Reform UK took control of the Kent County Council earlier this year, it decided to make the national anthem great again. Or maybe it decided to make patriotism pay. Or– 

Oh, never mind the motivations. Let’s stick with what it did. It amended the constitution to make sure full council meetings would open with the Lord’s Prayer and end with the national anthem. This would, admittedly, take time away from debating things like potholes and the county’s recurring water crises, but they’d thought of that: The council would make up the time by giving opposition parties less time to talk. They didn’t have enough votes to accomplish anything, so why make the majority listen to them? 

Would the council’s leader cut the amount of time he’d been allotted?

Well, no. That would be unreasonable. 

Irrelevant photo: mallow

 

But wasn’t all this divisive?

Of course not. The Lord’s Prayer, the council’s leader said, is a “profound unifier.” 

“We are Christians at the end of the day,” another Reform councillor said after rambling a bit about whether he was or wasn’t a Christian since he didn’t go to church but did pray to win the lottery.

The underlying assumption in all this is that Britain is Christian country, and technically it is. It has its own church. You can’t get much more Christian than that. If you want to measure by what people believe, though, the argument gets weaker. In the 2021 census, less than half the population of England and Wales called itself Christian. Christian did lead the list at 46%, followed by No Religion at 37%, Muslim at 6%, and Hindu at 1%. Jewish? That gets messier, since people could be Jewish on the religion question, on the ethnicity question, or on both, but for whatever the number means, .5% of the population is Jewish.

The second underlying assumption is that everyone at the meetings is Christian or willing to pretend in the face of social and political pressure. If I’d been on the council, I’d have felt called upon to stand up and recite the Shema, one of the Jewish prayers, while they were reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t speak Hebrew, I don’t pray, and I’d have to learn the words syllable by syllable, so this wouldn’t come to me easily (or well), but some things are worth the effort. I have a loud voice, which might make up for my lack of Hebrew and piousness.

Sadly, I don’t live in Kent and I’ve run for office exactly as often as I’ve prayed, so the prayer passed off with no events odd enough to make the news.

 

The anthem

Eventually the meeting ended, as all good meetings must. And all bad ones. The council members sang “God Save the King” and the Reform councillors began packing up their toys to go home but the Greens and some members of other opposition parties kept singing. It turns out the song has six verses and no one knows the last five. No one even knew they existed until the Greens handed song sheets out to opposition councillors. 

On they sang. They were admirably awful, and since the meetings are livestreamed, their performance went out to–oh, I don’t know, an audience of five or six, surely, and it was accompanied by subtitles from an automated system that make the meetings accessible to the deaf, the hard of hearing, and anyone with a Mute button. 

The Reform councillors shuffled feet and papers but couldn’t bring themselves to walk out because this was, after all, the national anthem, even if they no longer recognized it. The chair interrupted several times, trying to get control of the meeting, which either was or wasn’t over, but on they sang, while the automatic caption gizmo, for reasons no one will ever understand, switched from the words they were singing to the lyrics of the “Star Spangled Banner.”  

Politics don’t get any better than that. 

And now the bad news: The link to the meeting’s end has disappeared into the morass we know as the internet. I did see it, I can testify that it’s real, but all I can find now is an official version that cuts off before the fun starts. If anyone stumbles over it, send me a link, will you? I’ll insert it for the benefit of any latecomers.

 

All six bloody verses

People who are serious about what they sing in public have been known to stand visibly silent when the song’s sung. They’re not royalists, they’re not religious, or maybe they just like a bit of poetry with their music. Surely at least some of the people belting out the extra five verses in Kent would normally have stayed silent. But when you know that someone you dislike will be deeply annoyed if you do exactly what they told you to do, wouldn’t you make an exception?

Let’s look at all six verses. It’ll help us understand why the last five have fallen into hard-earned obscurity. Even if you can forgive the lyricist for trying to rhyne arise with enemies (or ene-myes) and laws and cause with voice, it still thumps through its stanzas on lead-weighted boots. Its shift from bloodthirsty to let’s-all-be-brothers and then back again is enough to cause whiplash. And then there’s that business about Marshal Wade and the rebellious Scots. 

Marshal who? The Scots? Aren’t they British these days? 

Stay with me. It’ll all be explained.

Verse 1: God save our gracious King, long live our noble King, God save the King! Send him victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us, God save the King.

Verse 2: O Lord our God arise, scatter our* enemies, and make them fall! Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks, on Thee our hopes we fix, God save us all.

Verse 3: Not in this land alone, but be God’s mercies known, from shore to shore. Lord make the nations see, that men should brothers be, and form one family, the wide world over.

Verse 4: From every latent foe, from the assassins blow, God save the King. O’er his thine arm extend, For Britain’s sake defend, our Father, prince, and friend, God save the King.

Verse 5: Thy choicest gifts in store, on him be pleased to pour, long may he reign. May he defend our laws, and ever give us cause, to sing with heart and voice, God save the King.

Verse 6: Lord grant that Marshal Wade, may by thy mighty aid, victory bring. May he sedition hush, and like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush. God save the King!

My London, which kindly dragged me through all six verses, notes that “Verse 6 is often omitted. It was added as a prayer for the success of Field Marshal George Wade’s army, which was assembling at Newcastle in 1745 to defend against the Scottish Uprising, led by Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

Nope, sorry. You have to respect tradition. Once in the national anthem, always in the national anthem.

 

A quick note from the Research Department

Since we’re doing absurdity today, I can’t leave you without noting that when I asked Lord Google for the lyrics, AI elbowed its way to the top of the page, as it always does these days, and gave me a version of “God Save the King” that started out with “God save our gracious Queen.” It went on merrily from there, saving the now-dead queen, not noticing that she never had been a king, and missing several of those unmissable verses. 

On the other hand, since it didn’t hack any neighboring countries’ anthems, no real harm was done, and I was able to move on to a more reliable version.

*

* Finally, I have no idea what the asterisk in verse two is about. It didn’t lead to any footnote, explanation, or alternative text that I could find. Let’s call it a typo. I’ve left it in because it fits so well with today’s theme. And in verse four, “O’er his thine arm extend” is probably another typo. My best guess is that it’s supposed to be “O’er him.” I could check it against some other version if I dug deep enough but how many of us really need to know?

 

And since absurdity isn’t limited to the UK . . . 

. . . the United States Department of Agriculture’s online tariff tracking site listed the fictional nation of Wakanda as one of the US’s free trade partners. It seems to have been added sometime after June 10 and was taken down after software engineer Francis Tseng noticed it and and went public.

46 thoughts on “Patriotism, politics, and the national anthem”

  1. Thank you, Ellen! I read this over my morning cup of tea, and it made my day. At least the beginning of it, let’s see how we get on. Hilarious—I had no idea. Our Greek national anthem is much better — an Ode to Freedom, written by a well known poet. So I felt momentarily proud, bless you

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    • I’ll have to look up the Greek national anthem. I won’t understand it–my Greek is limited to a few swear words and a few food words, which I can occasionally mix together so that head cheese takes me neatly to shithead–but I can at least appreciate the music. I’ll thank you in advance. I’ve generally held that national anthems don’t generally make good music, but the New Zealand anthem is beautiful–and bilingual.

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      • Is it? Good grief! I’ve ben “home” for a year and didn’t know we’re bi-lingual.Mind you, I’ve never sung the song so…hmm I have noticed MUCH more Maori-language signs, etc. And that’s good. 75 years ago I got told off for speaking Maori at school!

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        • I had to double check. I’d heard it sung in Maori but not in a formal setting. Yes, it’s usually in both languages. Last time I was there I noticed a lot of place names in the weather forecast were now bilingual. I know a few phrases and have tried to go beyond that but so far I’ve failed badly. I seem to need to learn languages in a formal setting instead of just picking them up. Do you still speak te reo?

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            • I wouldn’t say embarrassing. A loss, though. When my niece talked about needing to learn it better, I didn’t understand its importance, its power. I’ve started to get it and I wish I could pick it up. It’s hard to learn (or hold onto) a language that’s not in daily use in your life, though.

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  2. Wonderful!
    And I don’t see the line about extending thine arm over his as a typo…I think it’s a re-enforcement of godly aid!
    I don’t sing in public; I’d probably be so far off whatever key I should bein I’d bugger everyone else, too!

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  3. Hello, Ellen,
    Thanks for another humorous take on politics, I’m greatly in need of a laugh after seeing the news headlines this morning, political and other national.
    Jeannie

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    • Just saw a gloriously fake photo of Facebook of 4 secret service men jogging alongside a hot dog cart (or something along those lines–I think my memory’s doing a little photoshopping of its own) as it trundles down the Washington Mall.

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  7. This is hilarious! It also leaves me even more grateful that we weren’t made to sing the anthem at my citizenship ceremony; it’s true that only the first verse was printed on the back of the little card with the oath on it, but still…

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  10. I looked up the words to the Marseillaise, the French national anthem once, out of curiosity. That one goes on and on too, with all sorts of immoderate sentiments, as you can imagine. It is a rousing tune, though, unlike Canada’s rather plodding anthem. We’ve fiddled with the words too, to make them more inclusive. And the original version was in French; now both it and the English translation are official, which is fitting.

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    • I’ve never seen–or thought about, for that matter–all the words to the Marseillaise, but yes, there’s a rousing anthem. If that doesn’t get you out of your seat, I don’t know what it’ll take. The Canadian I heard a hundred years ago, when I was 19 or so, and I found it touching, maybe because my only point of comparison was the “Star Spangled Banner,” which is all over-the-top warlike sentiment. I didn’t know it was bilingual, though. Makes sense.

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  11. Thank you for the much-needed laugh. I would certainly have sung the first 5 verses if I had been there, but that would have made me a rebellious Scot so I should keep quiet for the last one (of which I was already aware but my memory had buried it).

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    • I sympathize, believe me. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with all the god save the king stuff, but when you’ve got a bunch of hypocrites right there who it’s really going to annoy– Some things are worth the sacrifice, I say.

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  14. My (somewhat thinned) Cornish blood made me find Trelawney on youtube. yes, I had to sing.
    We’ve been watching the All Blacks, currently in Sth Africa. and I noted that the Sth African teams sing their anthem in Afrikaans, then English. And so, apparently, do the All Blacks. Verse 1 Maori, verse 2 English.

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    • Trelawney, ironically, is entirely in English, but then it was written long after Cornish stopped being a spoken language. There’s a wonderful scene in one of the two Fisherman’s Friends movies (I didn’t love them but it’s a great scene) where they’ve promised to sing the national anthem, live, on the BBC, and they sing Trelawney.

      I find these bilingual national anthems very moving.

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  15. Hi Ellen, as a non-believer, I find the national anthem a bit awkward but I certainly approve of the general sentiment of the third verse. I’m not happy with the “men” and ‘brothers” (a bit exclusive, that) and the last phrase could scan better with a little adjustment but not a bad effort. C+ or even a B?
    Jeannie

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    • Thanks for making me laugh. I never thought to grade it but now that you have, yeah, I’d say you’re in the right range. If we’re talking about the music and emotional tone, it strikes me as a bit lugubrious (ooh, I don’t think I ever used that word before)–the kind of song that causes people to drag their feet.

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  17. I listened to a recording of “God Save the King” as sung by a choir in St Paul’s. Do the British always sing it so much more slowly than we sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” or only when they’re in a vast echoing cathedral where notes have to be dragged out so that the echoes don’t pile up on top of each other?

    PK

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