April 29, 2006

• The shit's gonna hit the fan this week, I can feel it.
• If we were a truly sapinet species, we should immediately ban all words to all national anthems, and just play the music instead. Yes, this should be made the Law in every land! *fat chance anything so sensible will be done*
• If we were truly a sapinet species, we would not recognise nations at all.
• How does one net a sapi? Same way as a clari?
• The only problem I see is that the translation deviates from the original in several ways that appear to be calculated for a political point. A faithful rendition in Spanish would go much further in support of their cause than a slanted interpretation. I believe that this will only serve to sway sympathetic neutrals on the issue toward the anti-illegal-immigration side.
• > we would not recognise nations at all and then we'd just have anthems, a free for all, and anthem smackdowns and may the most stirring and motivational music win. or maybe, we'd want the most affective music? i dunno. i both love and hate national anthems as they exist. i love them because they give you a quick entry into a stereotype about the nation concerned. moreover, there's a surprising number of nations whose anthems actually correspond to the stereotypes i have of them (i find this terribly comforting in a bizarre way). i fundamentally believe that a group of people who have a set of shared values should be able to sing about it. otherwise, there's a problem. on the downside, anthems are by their nature reductive, restrictive, and simplistic. there's a tendency among anthem bands to emphasize the metre over the message, or the pattern over the pathos.
• The difficulty is that the shared set of values uniting the citizenry has in the past so often boiled down to dislike for some other nation's/race's/society's/group's shared set of values. Which is a disgusting facet of human nature. Been recently involved with helping two friends attempt to track back to Hungary their Jewish grandfather: he arrived as a youngster in the New World in 1923, after Hungary had been convulsed by the Red Terror and then the White Terror -- so right now I'm not at all optimistic about such matters.
• La parole de l'OH peut vous voir, par la première lumière de l'aube ce que tellement fièrement nous avons grêlé à dernier briller du crépuscule There. That ought to give'm something to REALLY bitch about!
• It is going to be an interesting week. In order to achieve maximum backlash potential, fly the Mexican flag above the American one next.
• I was watching CNN the other day; one of the anchors made a comment along the lines of "Would it be such a big deal if it was in any other language but Spanish, like Pig Latin or something?" La Soledad gave him such a look!
• I'd be curious to know what the administration would say if the same thing was done by a Native American group. The Spanish were there first in a huge chunk of the (now) US anyway.
• Does it mean that the Bushes have lost the Cuban vote, and thus Florida?
• I'm old enough to remember the opening ceremony of the Calgary Winter Olympics, when they had a guy proudly singing "Oh Canada" in (I think) Inuit. They did a similar thing this winter in the little previewthingy for Vancouver at the closing ceremony in Turin. Anyway, I think the most interesting fact to come out of this is that even the loveliness of Latin American musical styling can't save The Star-Spangled Banner, surely one of the unrockingest tunes ever. I blogged about this a bit on my silly new LJ (self link alert, LiveJournal alert, massive shame alert.) Time to make America the Beautiful the national anthem, with an official translation as "America la linda" or something. (can't speak Spanish alert)
• It's only since the late 1980s (I think, that's when I became aware of it) that the NZ national anthem has been sung in Maori and English -- it was all in English before -- but that's not the same as a huge chunk of the population singing the language they brought into the country with them. If anything, it's the English version that's inappropriate I suppose.