It might be the first time that Bad Bunny has been suspected of cribbing from Irving Berlin.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Near the end of his Super Bowl halftime show<\/a>, the Puerto Rican rapper said \u201cGod bless America.\u201d<\/p>\n For many Americans, they were the only words that they could understand<\/a>, and ones that they presumably appreciated.\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019ve come a long way, though, from Berlin\u2019s World War I-era song that asks for God\u2019s blessings on America and invokes the geographic majesty of our vast nation, \u201cfrom the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.\u201d<\/p>\n Bad Bunny didn\u2019t mean America the country, but America the continents.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s something special about this place<\/a>.<\/p>\n With apologies to Lee Greenwood, Bad Bunny is proud to be an American \u2014 just not an \u201cAmerican\u201d like most people in the United States think of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The NFL made history with the show in two ways.<\/p>\n For the first time, it had a performer who sang in a language about 85% of the US population doesn\u2019t speak<\/a>, a victory for gratuitous inscrutability.<\/p>\n Were none of the stars who sing in English available?<\/p>\n 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 \u201cAmerica.\u201d<\/p>\n To think that, once upon a time, the likes of Prince and Katy Perry simply aimed to put on a good show.\u00a0<\/p>\n In an echo of singer Billie Eilish inveighing against America stealing land at the Grammy Awards<\/a>, Bad Bunny said of his language proficiency in a pre-Super Bowl press conference, \u201cEnglish is not my first language. But it\u2019s OK, it\u2019s not America\u2019s first language either.\u201d<\/p>\n This sounds clever until you give it a moment\u2019s thought.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n Bad Bunny\u2019s first language, Spanish, was a colonial imposition in the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492.<\/p>\n If the rapper wanted to associate himself with languages prior to this wave of European settlement, he\u2019d have to sing in, say, Nahuatl or Algonquian.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that the Spanish language got a head start over English in what\u2019s now the United States, when Ponce de Leon showed up on the Florida peninsula in 1513.<\/p>\n But so what? English-speakers forged a permanent presence at Jamestown in 1607.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n That the country they founded goes by \u201cAmerica\u201d is an affront to elements in Latin America and on the left.<\/p>\n They consider it insulting to everyone else living in North America or South America: Aren\u2019t they Americans, too?<\/p>\n Certainly not everyone feels this way \u2014 the Canadians have as little interest in being called \u201cAmericans\u201d as they do in becoming the 51st state.<\/p>\n