COMMENTARY:

Oh, Say, Can You See Xenophobia in a Land of Immigrants?

No, what Bush was describing is a version of the American national anthem in Spanish—"Nuestro Himno [Our Anthem]—which was played on American Hispanic radio and television stations recently.

But in America, the broadcast of a Spanish version of "The Star Spangled Banner" has aroused a somewhat different response. Charles Key, great-great-grandson of Francis Scott, offered the immortal words, "I think it's despicable thing that someone is going into our society from another country and...changing our national anthem."

"This is evoking spirited revulsion on the part of fair-minded Americans," offered John Teeley, representative of one of innumerable private propaganda mills in Washington commonly dignified as think-tanks. Mr. Teeley continued, "You are talking about something sacred and iconic in the American culture. Just as we wouldn't expect people to change the colors of the national flag, we wouldn't expect people to fundamentally change the anthem and rewrite it in a foreign language."

A foreign language? There are roughly 30 million Spanish speakers in the United States. The analysis here is interesting: an immigrant singing an anthem in his own language resembles someone changing the national flag. This argument does, perhaps unintentionally, reveal the real concern: Hispanics are changing our country, and we don't like it.

So it is not surprising that the American low-life constituency's political and moral hero, George Bush, should declare: "I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English."

Throughout history, fascism is closely associated with xenophobia, but then we find many other unpleasant aspects of fascism—from illegal spying to recording what people read in libraries, from torture to illegal invasion—feature in George Bush's America.

• Related stories from Google News