Share and Follow
In an unexpected twist, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny has drawn comparisons to legendary songwriter Irving Berlin.
During the closing moments of his Super Bowl halftime performance, Bad Bunny surprised many by uttering the phrase “God bless America.”
For numerous viewers, these words stood out as some of the few they could easily comprehend, and they were likely well-received by the audience.
It’s interesting to note how far we’ve come since the days of Berlin’s World War I-era anthem, which calls upon divine blessings for America while celebrating the country’s sweeping landscapes, “from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.”
However, when Bad Bunny uttered “America,” he wasn’t referring to the United States specifically, but rather to the broader expanse of the American continents.
He name-checked the United States only in a list of other countries in the Western Hemisphere, and only toward the end, lest anyone get the idea that there’s something special about this place.
With apologies to Lee Greenwood, Bad Bunny is proud to be an American — just not an “American” like most people in the United States think of it.
The NFL made history with the show in two ways.
For the first time, it had a performer who sang in a language about 85% of the US population doesn’t speak, a victory for gratuitous inscrutability.
Were none of the stars who sing in English available?
Also, for the first time ever, the NFL gave its stage to a performer who sought to put the country in its place and undermine its claim to be called “America.”
To think that, once upon a time, the likes of Prince and Katy Perry simply aimed to put on a good show.
In an echo of singer Billie Eilish inveighing against America stealing land at the Grammy Awards, Bad Bunny said of his language proficiency in a pre-Super Bowl press conference, “English is not my first language. But it’s OK, it’s not America’s first language either.”
This sounds clever until you give it a moment’s thought.
Bad Bunny’s first language, Spanish, was a colonial imposition in the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492.
If the rapper wanted to associate himself with languages prior to this wave of European settlement, he’d have to sing in, say, Nahuatl or Algonquian.
It’s true that the Spanish language got a head start over English in what’s now the United States, when Ponce de Leon showed up on the Florida peninsula in 1513.
But so what? English-speakers forged a permanent presence at Jamestown in 1607.
They then populated the Eastern seaboard, won their independence, stood up enduring institutions of representative government, and made English the most important and widely spoken language in the world.
That the country they founded goes by “America” is an affront to elements in Latin America and on the left.
They consider it insulting to everyone else living in North America or South America: Aren’t they Americans, too?
Certainly not everyone feels this way — the Canadians have as little interest in being called “Americans” as they do in becoming the 51st state.
It is people hypersensitive to any Yanqui imperialism, including “linguistic imperialism,” who complain about us hogging the name “America.”
Sad to say, they are late to the game.
Americans began calling themselves Americans in the 1700s to set them themselves apart from the British.
An anonymous writer in The Virginia Gazette in March 1776 referred to “the united states of America,” and Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence said it was a statement of “the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (subsequently changed to “the thirteen united States of America”).
Once we were the USA, the question became how to refer to our people.
As “United States men and women”?
Various solutions were tried out before we settled on “American,” which now denotes not just our country, but a set of clearly defined cultural traits.
It’s bizarre that the NFL had a halftime show that questioned this understanding.
Although in the league’s defense, surely, few people picked up on it — or understood anything else that was said.
X: @RichLowry