The following letter of mine was published on May 8 in the West County Times:
"Bush ... left no doubt when a reporter asked whether he believed the national anthem would hold the same value if it were sung in Spanish. 'No,' he said without hesitation. 'I don't.'"
President of the United States? This sounds like the President of DENSA, MENSA's evil twin.
A song or poem does not have value, period; it only has value in the context of the person reading, hearing or singing it. Can even George Bush imagine that a new citizen who speaks fluent Spanish and perfunctory 21st-century workplace English would get more value out of a collection of early-19th-century poetic misrenderings such as "O'er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming" than he would out of a decent 21st-century Spanish translation?
"The Star Spangled Banner" has been translated and sung for years, even before it became our national anthem, in other languages, up to and including Esperanto. Why must we get our underwear in a knot over this right now? Don't we have better things to argue about?