"Home of the Brave" in Jeopardy

The Brand Protection division of the US Department of State is reportedly sounding the alarms over the suddenly impending international legal retention proceedings with respect to America’s exclusive ownership of the label “Home of the Brave”.

According to sources, a recent friendly notice from the Title and Leasehold branch of the World Court reminded America’s marketing corps that in 1814 when the Georgetown lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key paid out of his own pocket to legally confer on his young country the honorific of his own poetic making, “Home of the Brave,” he perhaps over frugally and/or shortsightedly chose to spend three dollars on a 200-year lease instead of paying an extra two dollars to make America the official Home of the Brave in perpetuity.

Said senior brand protection officer Victoria Bennett, “As if we didn’t have enough to worry ourselves sick about with all this holding of the fort against the growing lowdown that America is no democracy anymore, now we get to argue before an international court of law that the people who just let a government of, by, and for the people be taken away from them without putting up anything remotely resembling a fight are somehow uncommonly stout of heart.

“So yeah, you bet that sound you hear is me pissing myself. You bet you’re looking at an aneurism waiting to happen thanks to this big brick I’m passing here because all of a sudden by next year we have to build the case that America is still the Home of the Brave, all while sweating bullets over what happens if we fail and the world quits fearing our reputation for bravery.”

“No problem,” said a visibly shaken member of the American marketing corps speaking on strict condition of anonymity. “I mean, all we have to do is explain away to the entire world the meteoric rise of the American chickenhawk in all spheres and at all levels of public and private life.

“Oh, and I guess we’ll need to address the use of flying remote control weapons of mass destruction to kill an American teenager half a world away from the homeland everybody was afraid of him terrorizing. Oh yeah, and we shouldn’t keep forgetting the hundreds if not thousands of non-American children and their mothers and old grandparents we safely explode based on legalisms we’re not even brave enough to shine a light on.

“And I guess we need to cover the torturing of clearly innocent and also maybe guilty but also quite possibly innocent and also clearly guilty but in any case still completely defenseless and legally protected people in our secret custody.

“And I guess there’s all the debilitating fear of facing such simple and so often and clearly proven truths as the fact that the people we fear so much don’t hate us for our freedoms, which, by the way, we don’t really even have anymore because we gave them up in all our fear of those who “hate us for freedoms”. They hate us because we keep committing the acts of violence and other kinds of harm against them that we’re not brave enough even to admit to ourselves that we’ve been committing against them for decades.

“There’s also of course all the fear of God and debt and science and homosexuals and women and the UN and brown people and other kinds of aliens and anybody who might maybe take away any or all of the guns needed for protection against all there is to fear.

“And of course we can’t forget the tens and tens and more and more tens of millions of non-rich Americans who just keep letting their lunch money be taken from them by a small band of overgrown schoolyard overcompensators for some unbelievably deep-seated fears about their worth.

“I fear we’re experiencing not only fear but also the fearful fear of fear itself in the scary face of this horrifying World Class War the Makers are waging so cagily that the American Taker can’t stop fearfully vilifying the Scandinavian and Latin American and Icelandic heroes acquitting themselves with such true bravery in the taking on of the capitalist class war mongers that they’re likely to start bravely staking their claim to America’s Home of the Brave label.”

Said Ms. Bennett, “I’m beginning to think America should exercise the better part of valor and prudently bow out of this court battle for the title to the title of the world’s Home of the Brave.

“Perhaps our poet laureate Natasha could just append a disclaimer of some kind to the end of our national anthem. Maybe the last line could go something like ‘…and the home of the brave…when it comes to brutally fighting off the awful truth about our cowardice.’

“This embarrassing disclaimer of course would be drowned out by the automatic roar the word “brave” inspires in the crowds at any event where the Star Spangled Banner is ever sung.”

In related news, sources inside the State Department are telling Shining City Gazette that a notice from the World Court has been sitting unopened for weeks on a desk in the division of Brand Protection. The fear apparently is that Francis Scott Key also skimped when it came to registering the title “Land of the Free”.