Something is broken in our politics. Just about everyone knows it, but it can be hard to put your finger on what it is.

As the media attempt to grapple with this felt reality, they reach over and over for the same word: polarization. That, we're told, is the shorthand for what has gone wrong. Where once the country had its share of conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans, and mushy moderates, today the two parties are more internally consolidated—and further apart from each other—than ever.

“We the People” — we Americans — need to reconnect with the secret of our success. We are fixated on regress.

No, 1619 is not our origin story. Slavery is an old-world inheritance — a top-of-list sin, to be sure, but not a unique one.

Our treatment of American Indians was not our finest hour either. It started before 1619 and continued after the abolition of slavery in 1865.

An Italian wise guy, Machiavelli, said that the origins of all nations involve some amount of “force and fraud.”

Independence Day has arrived as the United States is rocked by hearings over the Jan. 6 insurrection, awash in turmoil over high court rulings on abortion and guns and struggling to maintain the bonds that keep it together.

Yet many also see cause to celebrate Monday: the deadly danger of the pandemic has lessened and, despite its fault lines, America’s democracy survives.

The Fourth of July is a day of summer weather, barbeques and national hot dog eating competitions in America as the nation celebrates its independence.

But few people will know that the tune of the US national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner”, a song sung proudly at every Super Bowl, actually originally came from England.

The melody to which Francis Scott Key set the lyrics was derived from “To Anacreon in Heaven”, the constitutional song of the Anacreontic Society, a private gentleman’s club in London.

The national anthem of the United States is full of surprises, writes Mark Clague, a professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, in “O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

Nearly everything about the 208-year-old anthem – from its meaning to how people sing it – has changed over time. Like America itself, the song is always evolving, Professor Clague tells the Monitor. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed. 

You point out that the first line is a question, not a declaration. Can you explain?

I’m a singer living in Nashville, Tennessee — Music City, USA. But at age 64, you won’t find me singing at the honky-tonks. You’re much more likely to hear me singing in my church choir or perhaps a ballpark.

That’s because I’ve sung the national anthem in public for 20 years. I even accomplished one of my lifelong dreams: to sing for my beloved Chicago Cubs and nearly 40,000 fans at a packed Wrigley Field.

That single performance turned into multiyear, cross-country quest to sing the anthem at all the ballparks in the Chicago Cubs organization, which I completed in 2018.

For all the pomp and circumstance of its presentation, there is something admirably humble about America’s national anthem. Britain’s anthem is cartoonish, with its repeated entreaties to “save” an already-well-secured monarch and its insistence that God is destined to “scatter” the “knavish” enemies of the crown. France’s anthem is utopian, with all those references to the “child of the fatherland,” the “day of glory,” and the prospect of “impure blood” watering the fields. But America’s? America’s has about it that quality of the unknown. From the outset, it poses questions.

On this Fourth of July, it’s worth pondering the true meaning of patriotism.

It is not the meaning propounded by the “America first” crowd, who see the patriotic challenge as securing our borders.

For most of its existence America has been open to people from the rest of the world fleeing tyranny and violence.

Nor is the meaning of patriotism found in the ravings of those who want America to be a white Christian nation.

America’s moral mission has been greater inclusion – equal citizenship for Native Americans, Black people, women and LGBTQ+ people.

Last week, the House passed a "gun reform" package that's unlikely to pass the Senate. Then, a bipartisan group of senators struck a deal on modest "gun reform" proposals with better prospects. Whatever your take on the merits of these bills, describing legislative proposals for restrictive measures as "reform" is a jarring use of the word—especially after recent national discussions about reducing criminalization as part of a genuine effort to reform the criminal justice system.

John Adams, who would soon surrender the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, ventured up to Capitol Hill on Nov. 22, 1800, to deliver the first-ever in-person presidential address in the not-yet-finished home of the United States Congress.

It was noon on a Saturday. What message did he deliver?

First, Adams congratulated the American people for building the Capitol itself.