The events of September 11 attacks have set everyone to rethinking the significance of patriotic symbols, but change was in the air anyway. The last time we overhauled the apparatus of patriotism was around the turn of the twentieth century. The Pledge of Allegiance was composed in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Boston socialist and Baptist minister. And it wasn't until 1916 that President Wilson issued an executive order that made "The Star-Spangled Banner" our official national anthem, around the same time he declared Flag Day a national holiday.

The "Star-Spangled Banner" is the most vulnerable of all of these symbols. On the one hand, a lot of people feel the song is too militaristic; not long ago, a school board in Madison, Wisconsin instructed schools to use only an instrumental version. That's not entirely a fair charge Û after all, those rockets and bombs were coming from the British ships that were bombarding Fort McHenry as Francis Scott Key watched helplessly from the harbor, and a song about America surviving a foreign attack should be very much à propos right now.

Still, many people would as soon have an anthem with no war images at all. And "The Star-Spangled Banner" does have insurmountable musical deficiencies. It's fun to cheer at a baseball game when a performer hits the high note on "land of the free." But there are times when people want to be able to sing an anthem in unison without requiring throat surgery afterwards.

In fact, people seem to be adopting auxiliary anthems in a spontaneous way. During the last few weeks of the major-league season, baseball teams were playing "God Bless America" just before "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" at the seventh-inning stretch, and a lot of spectators were responding just as they do with "The Star-Spangled Banner," standing and removing their hats. It's certainly the catchiest of all the contenders, and it would be fitting for America to have an anthem written on Tin Pan Alley. But the title would be controversial, and most Americans would want their official anthem to be a bit mustier and more decorously phrased.

"America the Beautiful" has a suitable pedigree; it was composed in 1892 by a Wellesley professor named Katherine Lee Bates. The movement to make it our national anthem goes back to 1926, and  has gained support since September 11. Willie Nelson closed the all-star TV benefit on September 22 by leading everyone in singing the song, and ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr has a new book high on the bestseller lists with the title "America the Beautiful": The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation's Favorite Song.

The appeal of the song isn't hard to explain. "America the Beautiful" may not be a stirring hymn like "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the only patriotic song that America has produced that could go elbow-to-elbow with the Marseillaise and Deutschland Uber Alles if it came to a showdown in Rick's Cafe. But it's a pleasant tune (and more than that, when Ray Charles sings it), and it's one that we can join in on without self-consciousness.

But what really endears the song to Americans is its lyrics, with their invocations of coast-to-coast brotherhood and above all their pretty scenic pictures, like a set of old chromolithograph postcards. (There's more later on about the need for self-control and "liberty in law," but no one ever bothers about the later stanzas of these songs.) Even so, it troubles me to think of "America the Beautiful" as a national anthem. I'm made nervous by its overblown language, with its contorted syntax and fulsome descriptions. You have to be wary of any verses that have that many adjectives in them, particularly orotund vocables like "spacious," "amber," "purple," and "fruited" -- and "beautiful," for that matter, which is usually something better implied than said.

This isn't just a stylistic quibble. That overwriting is characteristic of the late-nineteenth-century sentimentalization of a vanishing rural America, and the attendant fear that urbanization and industrialization were eroding traditional American values. (That notion is picked up in later stanzas, where Bates complains that the "banner of the free" is being stained by "selfish gain" and hopes for an age of "nobler men" to "keep once again thy whiter jubilee.") Those are themes that modern Americans can easily sympathize with, given our own concerns about the threatened environment. But, now as then, it puts the essence of the country far from the daily lives that most of us live. As a kid in Manhattan, I remember singing about purple mountains and waves of grain and thinking that America must be a distant place, somewhere out beyond New Jersey. And Bates's sublime landscape has no more to do with the country that most Americans inhabit now, a land of spacious parking lots and amber traffic signals.

Granted, we all love our purple mountains, not to mention the deserts, wetlands, headlands, redwood forests, headlands, and all the other natural beauties that our country affords us. But it's reductive to make our landscape the focus of our national anthem. Any country can do that. The Swiss sing about the Alps going bright with splendor; the Czechs sing about water bubbling across the meadows and pinewoods rustling amongst the crags; the Brazilians sing about the sound of the sea and the light of heaven. And the Syrian anthem begins with a remarkable entomological trope: "Syria's plains are towers in the heights . . . A land resplendent with brilliant suns. . . . almost like a sky centipede."

Anthems like those are appropriate for nations that have no essential commitment to a particular form of government: landscapes don't have any politics, after all. But the American experiment was supposed to be different; our patriotism is for a nation, not a land. No other country tells its story as the history of a single regime. That ought to be at the forefront of whatever anthem we sing.

There's a curious parallel between the swelling popularity of "America the Beautiful" and the Administration's choice of the phrase "homeland security" rather than "domestic security" to describe the new office headed by Governor Ridge. It's easy to understand what they were getting at, given the shock of an attack on American soil. But even though "homeland" is a perfectly good English word, up to now we've never used it to describe our own country. It has an alien sound, like the German word Heimat Û it's the word we use for peoples who feel an ancestral connection to a particular plot of ground. Whereas the idea of America isn't that it's a place that people come from but a place that they come to. The Germans and Palestinians and Kurds and Ukrainians have homelands; we just have a nation and a flag.

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