No wonder so many Americans won’t stand for the national anthem. It’s nearly un-singable. It’s warlike and un-aspirational. And it supports slavery and racism.

All right, Mr. Trump. In attacking the NFL and NBA players who one way or another refused to stand and put their hands on their hearts when The Star Spangled Banner was played, you’ve opened and then dumped the contents of a giant can of worms onto your own plate. Now it’s time for you to eat them.

Just to begin, athletes, like everyone else, are guaranteed freedom of expression by the U.S. Constitution, which is one of the things for which the American flag is a symbol. Thus, when you choose to deny them this freedom, Mr. Trump, it is you who is disrespecting the flag.

You have ignored the simple truth that the protest of these athletes is legitimate — that as people of color, they are regularly the victim of police brutality, documented so many times in recent years that you have to be willfully blind to claim it does not exist.

Since you’ve brought up the national anthem, let’s also deal with the question of why it deserves no respect and ought to be dumped in favor of some other song. The answer boils down to this: our great nation has one of the lousiest national anthems in the world. Consider:

The Star Spangled Banner is virtually un-singable. The clip of Roseanne Barr slaughtering it at the top of this post may have been Barr’s idea of a sendup, but it wasn’t very far from the truth. 

You can carry a tune and still, like million of Americans, you may not be able to credibly sing this unmusical, unlyrical song. It staggers over wide-ranging octaves like a careening drunk bouncing off walls. 

What’s more, the anthem’s lyrics are so ineptly out of meter with the music that singers need to insert syllables where none exist in the English language, disrespecting not only the dignity of our nation, but  our language as well. Example: (“And the star spangled ban-ner in tri-yi-yi-umph sha-all way-ave….”)

Speaking of drunks, the music was actually composed for a bunch of drunks with sex on their minds. It was a song written and boozily sung originally in England, not America, in the Eighteenth Century, by members of a drinking club, the Anacreontic Society.

But worse yet, the little-known and even less-sung final stanza of the Star Spangled Banner all but curses enslaved black men.

Here are the pertinent lines of the stanza:

Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The "foul footsteps" to which Francis Scott Key refers are those of slaves in Maryland who fought on the side of the English when promised their freedom. So clearly Key, himself a slaveholder, didn’t not consider black people suitable citizens for either the land of the free or the home brave. 

No indeed. Instead he believed blacks were “a distinct and inferior race of people which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that affects a community.”   Little wonder he cursed them with the “gloom of the grave.” For that reason alone the song deserves to be stricken from opening ceremonies. It is not a patriotic song. It is anti-patriotic.

So what should we sing instead? Well before World War I, in Newark, New Jersey, a woman named Katherine Lee Bates and an Episcopal choirmaster named Samuel A. Ward wrote a beautiful, melodic, easy-to-sing and patriotic hymn. It was about our nation and its natural beauty, and brotherhood — and not about a battle and a curse on some of our people. Moreover, unlike the Star Spangled Banner, it mentions — repeatedly — the name of our nation. 

It concedes the nation has flaws. It calls upon God to men them. It mentions liberty, law, gleaming cities of alabaster, and brotherhood. Yes, "America The Beautiful." Here’s a touching rendition of it by Ray Charles

And for a backup? In 1893 a poor immigrant boy with no skills and as yet little education was permitted to enter the United States. In time he discovered he had a talent for writing songs. Over the years he created great fortunes and employment for others with this talent, writing over 20 Broadway hit shows. 

Among his many songs were “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,”  and the holiday songs “In Your Easter Bonnet,” and “White Christmas.” His name?  Irving Berlin.

Perhaps Berlin’s his greatest and — dare I say it? — most sacred song was a hymn he wrote to the country that let him in, instead of attempting to wall him out.

Think what a glorious song a new national anthem could be, if America focused on its mission and message to humanity, and not always, constantly, incessantly, annoyingly on you, Mr. Trump, playing while you're all alone at night with your petty little tweeter.

Here is Irving Berlin, late in life and a bit frail with age, singing his song — followed by a chorus that demonstrates the way God Bless America could sound in stadiums and theaters across America if it became the new national anthem.

The Scottsboro Boys—an uncomfortable reminder and a dramatic mindbender

It’s out of keeping with my cranky and mostly-political persona to do favorable theater reviews, but I’m making an exception in this case.

The Scottsboro Boys is an unlikely musical comedy about an American tragedy. It's playing off-Broadway. It deserves to be on Broadway.

In March of 1931, there was a fracas on a freight train between young groups of white and black “hobos” who were using what was then a popular means of travel among those hordes of broke and unemployed Americans. The free-for-all led to the arrest of nine teen-aged black youths on charges of rape, based on the dubious accusations (and later on, the highly incredible testimony) of two young white women who were also hobos on the same train.

The nine "Scottsboro boys" were initially sentenced to death. Their kangaroo court trial and conviction became a cause celebre, taken up by northerners, initially including the American Communist Party.

There were appeals, reversals, retrials, more reversals, and a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case—and on and on. In the end, the Scottsboro Boys escaped the death penalty, but justice was nevertheless denied and the system did not work.

All this hardly sounds like the stuff for singing, dancing and comedy. But the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the music and lyrics, and David Thompson who wrote the book, pulled it off, just as Kander and Ebb did with similarly tragic and ironic material in the musical Chicago.

To be sure, the play has its historical (or at least interpretive) flaws. Not least among them is that it paints Samuel Leibowitz, the New York lawyer who defended the Scottsboro boys after the first trial, as something of a legal hack who advised Haywood Patterson to plead guilty in exchange for immediate parole. Patterson had such formidable strength of character that he refused, choosing instead to finish his life in prison.

But Liebowitz, having seen the intractability of the racist legal system in Alabama at the time, was probably doing the best anyone could under the circumstances. He was acting as much as a hostage negotiator as a lawyer. He got as many of the Scottsboro boys out of prison as he could and saved the rest from the electric chair, no mean achievement for that place and time. In fact, one accounting describes his cross-examination of one of the obviously fabricating rape victims as “merciless.”

But this is a musical comedy after all, and a mind-blowing one at that. An anti-racist spectacle, it uses as its primary conceit an ancient racist convention—the minstrel show. In further twists, blacks play not only blacks but also whites and white women. and, in an end-of-show number, the black cast plays whites who are playing blacks. Many in the cast have multiple roles.

It all comes off as a challenge not only to force us to remember America’s long history of racial injustice, but also as a nervous-making kind of Cuisinart chopper-dicer-blender of our own racial assumptions, good, bad or otherwise.

I was particularly impressed by the performances of Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon, each of whom played a variety of roles, and Julius Thomas III who played Roy Wright, the 12 year old facing the electric chair, with such utter conviction that one could see the terror in his eyes from several rows back.

Which is not to say that the performances of any member of the cast was anything less than impressive. For example, Brandon Victor Dixon gave the character of Haywood Patterson, the prisoner who refused to plead guilty and walk free, with a completely convincing mixture of rage and dignity. Christian Dante White and Sean Bradford several times made the transition from terrified black youths to lying white tramps and back again, and had me believing it. Sharon Washington, the only woman in the cast, provided a haunting presence as "A Lady." John Cullum, the only white actor, (you may remember him from the TV series Northern Exposure) pulled off his own multiple rules with perfection.

I take it as a good omen that Cullum was in this off-Broadway show. His last off-Broadway appearance was in Urintetown, a musical that deservedly made it to Broadway.

If you live in new York or you're planning to visit New York any time soon, you can order tickets online here.