On God-Save-The-Queen-Gate
With God-Save-The-Queen-Gate reverberating through the Olympic news cycles, I’d be remiss if I didn’t, with all humility intended, add to the discussion, as if what is sorely missing is another take from someone who has never set foot on any of the British Isles. But onward, then, to the quote I found most laughably perfidious, which of course came via Twitter and of course came from Piers Morgan: “To clarify, God Save The Queen is the BRITISH National Anthem. And this is a BRITISH football team. Sing it, or don’t play.”
Where to begin?
Let’s start, appropriately enough, at the beginning. “God Save the Queen” is the British national anthem. Well, yes, it is the de facto anthem, whose official adoption has arisen from convention and popular use, not from anything resembling a parliamentary vote. So, GSTQ is the national anthem of Great Britain like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is the anthem of Major League Baseball.
Which brings us to the next part, that this is a British football team. Again, yes, that’s technically correct, but to say that all the players should identify as culturally English (the anthem is not talking about the Queen of Scots, is it?) is like saying that all US players from Texas should identify with Washington, DC.
If the US national anthem had lyrics about subjugating the South, or even, for that matter, praising the power of the president, I’d think (or like to think, in the latter case) that many American players would conspicuously abstain.
In fact, (African) American players have previously gone well beyond abstaining, as in the case of Mexico City ‘68, where Tommie Smith and John Carlos made perhaps the most iconic and lasting image we have of athletes on an Olympic podium. Just google “Olympics” and “Black Power.”
Is there any sensible person around today who thinks that Smith and Carlos (the former, by the way, was born in Clarksville, TX) should have just sucked it up and sang the anthem?
“God Save The Queen,” it must be noted, has some objectionable lyrics as seen from many vantages, both within and outside of Wales. Many of these more juicy verses are thus not usually sung aloud, but they’re part of the song’s tradition and cannot, without much tenuous stretching, be separated from its overall effect. For example:
- O Lord, our God, arise,
- Scatter her enemies,
- And make them fall.
- Confound their politics,
- Frustrate their knavish tricks,
- On Thee our hopes we fix,
- God save us all.
This verse is nothing, however, compared to a verse since dropped altogether:
- 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.
Yikes.
And then, finally, we come to: Sing it, or don’t play. Well the last time I checked, part of the cultural and historical essence of what we call modern “Britishness” is the ability to decide when one does or does not sing—or am I missing a clause in the charter somewhere?
Ironically, maybe the best thorn in the British side would’ve been for the Welsh not to play, since without Joe Allen, Ryan Giggs, and Craig Bellamy, Team GB would have most likely bowed out in the group stage. What would Piers Morgan sing then?
