Feb 4, 2014 2 min read

Perhaps the only thing more absurd than the hand-wringing about onetime countercultural hero Bob Dylan lending his grizzled persona to a Super Bowl Chrysler ad – he has previously been a pitchman for Cadillac and Victoria’s Secret, so this is nothing new – is the hullabaloo generated by a Coca-Cola spot that also aired during the game.

The ad, dubbed “It’s Beautiful,” had a variety of people of assorted hues and various walks of life singing “America the Beautiful” in different languages. The sentiments are no different than those expressed in a Coca-Cola commercial that aired incessantly in the early 1970s, which had a rainbow coalition of soft drink enthusiasts singing about how they’d “like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” However, the fact the commercial depicted people singing “America the Beautiful” in – shock! horror! – a language other than English apparently led the easily outraged to their keyboards in fits of pique. Allen West, a former congressman and now part of the stable of Fox News yakkers, wrote on his blog that “if we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing ‘America the Beautiful’ in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come – doggone we are on the road to perdition.”

West and his ilk need to be reminded, of course, of this country’s immigrant heritage and the polyglot of humanity that came through Ellis Island in the late 19th century and early 20th century. They, in fact, filled communities like Canonsburg and Washington. Canonsburg once had “Italian” streets and “German” streets, and people from throughout Europe worked in the region’s mines and factories. It’s still possible to find folks who happily reminisce about how their parents spoke in some other language on the phone when they didn’t want their children to know what they were talking about.

We weren’t on the road to perdition then, and we aren’t on the road to perdition now.