Big sporting events like the Olympics are the only place where they should play a national anthem. Because national anthems aren’t good. They’re all pretty dreadful. That’s precisely why they play the national anthem when you win the gold medal; part of what you win is the chance to torment your opponents one last time by forcing them to listen to your country’s dreary anthem.
The Dutch Lesser Antilles understood this. The Dutch Lesser Antilles may have ceased to exist as a country back in 2010, but in 1988 they won a medal at the Winter Olympics (an impressive feat for a Caribbean country with no winter) and everyone was forced to listen to their national anthem, for which the official name is, “Anthem Without a Title.”
Unfortunately, it seems most people disagree with me about anthems. Amazingly, every member of Niagara Regional Council disagrees with me, which is almost unbelievable since you can’t get all of those guys to be unanimous about anything. And yet, when it came time to drop the national anthem from council meetings, they formed a rare united front in defense of good old ‘O Canada.’
For background: the Niagara Region’s procedural bylaw committee recently produced a recommendation that the national anthem no longer needs to be played before council meetings. Which was a good recommendation because the only thing I want my council representative to do at the council chambers is lower my property taxes. I don’t need them to first lazily participate in some lame sing-along of the anthem before they get down to business. Don’t waste time on pointless things. Be more like Masahiro Sakurai, the legendary Nintendo director who famously refused to add Dolby audio support to his video games because it meant they would have been required to display the Dolby logo when the game turned on. Even though they were only required to display the Dolby logo at the start for one single second, as Sakurai pointed out, that one second compounds quickly for players who just want to get to playing their video game.
“If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose,” said Sakurai.
Our anthem is even worse. It takes 74 seconds to get through ‘O Canada,’ which means Niagara Region councillors are stealing 74 seconds from every taxpayer in Niagara, every time they play that anthem. Let’s do some back-of-the-enveloper maths here: there are about 280,000 taxpayers in Niagara, paying for 74 seconds of anthem time every meeting, for 12 meetings per year, which works out to 248,640,000 seconds, or about 94 months of wasted time annually.
The worst part is that, in my opinion, I don’t think any of those councillors actually care about playing the anthem before council meetings, yet like all politicians they are paralyzed by the prospect of appearing “unpatriotic” and are therefore required to be weirdly obsessed with the national anthem.
By the way, none of this should be misconstrued as me being unpatriotic or anti-anthem. I hire a national anthem singer to belt out ‘O Canada’ before big events at the Fort Erie Race Track because I love a good rousing rendition of our anthem as much as the next guy.
But before a council meeting? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s unnecessary. A powerful performance of ‘O Canada’ before a hockey game stirs a certain kind of patriotism and pride that just feels right. But why are we trying to ignite that same sense of pride for a council meeting where a bunch of old dudes are going to yammer about wastewater rates and zoning bylaw amendments?
A Niagara Regional Council meeting has roughly the same energy level found at a retirement home shuffleboard match. Incidentally, I checked into it and even at the World Shuffleboard Championship, they don’t play any national anthems, so I think council is safe to skip it.
James Culic is better than you at shuffleboard and pickleball and euchre and all those other old folks games. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page or display your perfect-pitch patriotism in a moving letter to the editor.