The Left has now turned their cancel culture gaze to the national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner.

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Picking up the theme, writer Jody Rosen said in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that the anthem was musical trash and should be replaced by 70s pop hit “Lean on Me.” Let’s hang Rosen with his own words, shall we? He starts out with it’s racist, too mean, blah, blah, blah…

“But there are also arguments against ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on aesthetic grounds, criticisms that have dogged the anthem for decades. For one thing, it’s not an especially American song. Its lyrics are ornate and Anglophile, with syntax that frustrates the efforts of normal human Americans to follow along — to deduce who or what, exactly, is gleaming and streaming.”

Rosen here betrays his hatred for America and history. Not to mention his own stupidity. Apparently he has never thrilled to the soaring evocation to American freedom. He’s a writer for the leftist Los Angeles Times, so no surprise there. He also doesn’t like that it smacks of our 18th century British heritage.

He would prefer to substitute that heritage with a musical reference to a time of war, economic crisis, energy crisis, scandal, and general malaise. Yes, the 70s, a real kidney stone of a decade. If there is a group that brings it to incarnation, it’s the Left. Also, seems Rosen is too thick to follow the simple lyrics of the anthem.

“In recent weeks, suggestions for alternative national anthems have circulated online. The writer and critic Kevin Powell proposed John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ (Powell called it “the most beautiful, unifying, all-people, all-backgrounds-together kind of song you could have.”) ‘Imagine’ is less stodgy than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” said Rosen.

Ah, yes, “Imagine”…perhaps the dumbest song ever written. In some states, the proper ones, the admission of liking the song gets you involuntarily committed to a mental ward. Or at least it should. It is a hippy dippy utopian standard trotted out when leftists get together and idealistically dream of killing everybody else. Near the end of his life, not long after he publicly backed Ronald Reagan for president, John Lennon said he was “embarrassed” by the song and wished he could “burn every copy.” You see, Lennon grew up. Mr. Rosen has not yet done that.

Why does Mr. Rosen choose “Lean on Me”? His explanation: “The lyrics hold no pastoral images of fruited plains or oceans white with foam, no high-minded invocations of liberty or God. ‘Lean on Me’ is a deeply American song — but it’s not, explicitly at least, a song about America.”

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And here we have it: liberty and God have no place in an American anthem. Which perfectly seems to encapsulate Rosen’s view of America itself. And that last line, that an American national anthem should not be about America? That tells you all you need to know about Rosen’s dedication to logic.

There will be more on this as the replace-the-anthem movement picks up steam in the media and with the Democrats. But on this one, we’re safe. That is, if the president is re-elected.