The Myth of the Star-Spangled Banner

The
Myth of the Star-Spangled Banner

“But we aren’t corsairs,” I confided to Ms. Kirkegaard
"We are actually root-rock social scientists
 Measuring the vectors of those glamours
Which turn us into slaves and enslavers.

April 15, 1994

There are so many legends that rise from the hot air, on the western edge of the Great American desert. For example, the Myth of Billy the Kid will tell us that the freshly widowed Mrs. Alexander McSween remained in a her burning Lincoln County house long enough to play The Star Spangled Banner on her imported piano.

      Yet there may be subtle truths embroidered on the rudely hooped canvasses of these cloud-schooners which drift up from the smoke of the Western campfire. It would not have been much of an exaggeration to have represented all of the New Mexico of 1877 as one big burning house. The delicate fabric of compromises, alliances, and co-existences which balanced the Hispanic, Native, and Anglo elements of the complexly interwoven culture were being menaced by an insurgency of Anglo-Norman conquistadors in the Jesse James mold.

      Susan McSween’s protests over the indifference of paid-off civilian and military officials towards the murder of her husband played the national anthem loudly enough that way back in Washington D.C., President Hayes was prodded to appoint the veteran Abolitionist Lew Wallace as the territorial governor, with instructions to put out the
still-smouldering fire. This is why the legend persists, in spite of Susan McSween’s documented insistence, that she would never have been that foolhardy.¹

      When we drum and tune our guitars to accompany the coyotes under the stars, some people will call us corsairs. Even the Lady from Denmark, who should have known better, doesn’t yet understand the difference between a bandit like Jesse James, and a battina like Alexander McSween.

     “I want to join your banditoes,” she confided to me, back when Paranoid Alien Radio was just beginning to broadcast.

      Of course, I found myself confronting what seemed to me a rather unreasonable prejudice. Because we are a community of dark-skinned people salted with the occasional pale cosmopolitan, we are more than likely to be typecast in the role of Dick Turpin. This is unhistorical. To quote Walter Noble Burns, who was a fairly observant historian, “[The gun-slinging killers of the Wild West] were all blond. There was not a pair of brown eyes among them.”²

      But  even now, after various Marxist parties control about 1/3 of the seats in your Northern European parliaments, you Europeans still persist in clinging to the myth, that it was the Real People who were the aggressors, and that armored European prospectors who weren’t afraid to torture the Leprechaun to find the pot of gold, were simply our passive victims. We know that you have degrees, and that you have studied the Marxist theory of colonialism. But do you remember us?

     Do you remember who it was that taught the earliest cowboys and loggers how to live on the open plains and camp in the woods? Do you remember the people whose identity has been confused, because they were betrayed in their own homeland?

      “So  tell me a little of the data which you intend to publish in the journal of your Socialist Monarchy,” I challenge. “You found the noble savages, recorded their music – and in a few years your published reports shall have inspired a new form of rock and roll.”

      “Are you not the cynical one!” she declares.

      “Since I came out West I have learned a lot about the Marginalized Peoples.” I answer her. “If the thought of Marginalized Peoples is discussed in your academies, it is usually presented, as interpreted by anthropologists. So since you have come out here to interpret, will you allow me to interpret you?”

      “You’re  not a Noble Savage!” she exclaims. “What I can see, is that you are simply a goat, who has found a way to get through my defenses.”

1 Let us look a little more closely at the Myth of the Star-Spangled Banner. The custom of standing up for the Star-Spangled Banner is credited to Rossell G. O’Brien, who was regarded as the founding father of the Washington State Territorial Militia. O’Brien was also close to the Bar Association, and served as court clerk for the Territorial Court. His Civil War service brought him into hostile contact with Quantril's guerrilla forces in Missouri, so we can be assured that he was aware of the continuing neo-Confederate threat.

This may provide the clue to the riddle of why Susan McSweem was credited with playing the Star-Spangled Banner in a burning house. Alexander McSween was a lawyer who gave his life for the vision of an American West which would be ruled by reason and due process rather than through mobs driven be racial prejudice. Walter Noble Burns wanted to plant a flag on the trail, because he wanted us to remember that when Rossell G. O’Brien stood up for the Star-Spangled Banner in 1893, he was saluting Alexander McSween, as well as all of the others who had suffered and even died for the same vision.

The Star Spangled Banner did not actually become the National Anthem until 1931, although a 1916 presidential order by Woodrow Wilson paved the way.

¹Like all the noted killers of the West, Billy the Kid was of the blond
type. Wild Bill Hickok, Ben Thompson, King Fisher, Henry Plummer,
Clay Allison, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Frank and Jesse James, the
Youngers, the Daltons – the list of others is long – were all
blond. There was not a pair of brown eyes among them. – p. 60, The
Saga of Billy The Kid. 1925, University of New Mexico Press Edition, 1999. Albuquerque.