Some People Want A New National Anthem; We Have Some Suggestions

America is in a state of scouring its institutions for racism with the type of fervor you'd have when examining the sheets at a seedy motel for blood, piss, or worse. Most recently the country has turned its gaze towards our national anthem.

Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner" in 1814 and it became the National Anthem in 1931. Key, as it turns out, owned slaves.

Well, maybe you can separate the art from the artist, right? At least his views didn't bleed into the material and wait ... what is this?

"No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave."

That's a verse from the Star-Spangled Banner and you can be forgiven for not remembering it because it's one of the many we don't sing at ball games. (There are a lot of them.)

But I'm not here today to argue if we should or shouldn't keep "The Star-Spangled Banner" as our National Anthem. I'm only here to say that, if we do decide to nix ol' "oh say can you see," then I've got some suggestions for an alternative.

Look, if we're going to change this thing, then we can't be half-assed about it. We've got to go all the way. It's got to be fully American. It's gotta get us pumped up before the Red Sox take the field and after we launch a missile that takes out cyborg Osama Bin Laden. It's gotta be something like this:

We don't need lyrics. The lyrics are the ba-da-da-da-da-das we hear in our heart. We didn't even know the lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner anyway and if we did, they sounded as indecipherable as this: