Sinatra Song Celebrates an America That is Vanishing

"The House I Live In" is About the Equality of "All Races and Religions" Not the Fraud of Equity

What is America to me?
A name, a map, a flag I see:
A certain word, democracy
What is America to me?

Frank Sinatra has been gone now for 25 years. When he shifted into eternity, it was still possible to see the America that this man — who was so much more than just a singer, an actor or an entertainer — helped determine.

When Sinatra passed away in 1998, I was an Air Force public affairs officer in Comox, B.C. who was also a weekend lounge singer doing a pretty good Sinatra act that included songs made popular by Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and others who somehow walked the line between popular music and pure jazz for decades.

The morning after Sinatra died, I received 12 calls. All of tthese caller expresssed their concerns about Sinatra’s passing. Three of them asked if I needed any help with dealing with this catastrophe. I said I did not.

Of course I did.

Sinatra would often sing “The House I Live In” at concert appearances. The patriotic celebration of Americana was brilliantly written by Lewis Allan and Earl Robinson, who are all but forgotten in the Tin Pan Alley selection of songs. It wasn’t the most popular number in his vast repetoire that included such gems as I ‘ve Got You Under My Skin and The Lady is a Tramp but Old Blue Eyes would insist the audience shut up and listen to the lyrics. At his 1974 series of concerts at Madison Square Garden, he even politely asked he audience to be quiet: “Please …. please … please.”

He would almost always preface the music with a brief but personal monologue about how America had fulfilled all of his dreams and despite being an “imperfect country” because of events like Watergate, people should never lose faith in their nation.

The house I live in
A plot of earth, a street;
The grocer and the butcher
And the people that I meet.
The children in the playground
The faces that I see:
All races and religions
That's America to me

Sinatra won a special Oscar for a 1945 short film — the music videos of that era— that allows the 29-year old vocal sensation to sing two songs. One is a romantic ballad; the other is telling the neighborhood kids not to fight over thing like religion because America was bigger than squabbles like that. The song is a populist hymn to equality and opporunity without ever being preachy.

You might watch this film and say there isn’t a a black kid in the crowd. But watch the film for what it says: don’t hate your neighbor because he or she is a different than you are. Don’t hate. And despite all the idiotic hatespeech legislation that is on the books in the U.S. and Canada, people are attacking their neighbors right now because they are Jews or Muslims over the war in the Mideast. Is there a doctor in the house?

Can this film or can this song be more relevant than right now?

Sinatra was never preachy about civil rights either but he spent his life affirming the equality of “all races and religions” as the song stated by insisting that his black friend Sammy Davis, Jr. be allowed to stay in the same hotels as he clientelle he entertained in Las Vegas. Did you know that Nevada was a segregated state in those days. Sinatra had no time for that. That was who he was. He fought racial discrimination long before it became popular for public personalties to do so. And he didn’t give a damn if anyone cared about it.

The place I work in
The worker by my side;
A little town or city
Where my people lived and died.
The howdy and the handshake,
The air of feeling free
And the right to speak my mind out:
That's America to me.

Sinatra was always an advocate of free speech and if you listen to his concert monologues, he let you know that he didn’t like very many journalists, especially the entertainment reporters like Rona Barrett, whom he wuld skewer in his commentary. My God how he disliked Rona Barrett. But he never for a moment dreampt of forbidding them to write their rubbish; he just demanded the right to fight back. That was part of “the air of feeling free and the right to speak my mind out.”

He could never imagine an America where people could be cancelled and forgotten for holding the wrong opinions or saying the wrong things That wasn’t America to him.

The things I see about me,
The big things and the small;
The little corner newsstand
And the house a mile tall.
The wedding and the churchyard
A laughter and the tears;
And the dream that's been a growing
For a hundred and eighty years.

That last line changed over the course of his long career as America grew older.

But as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches in 2026, it will be celebrated in an America that has lost its way and that no longer believes in the veracity or the efficacy of something called equality but is mindlessly and feverishly promoting the toxic dogma of equity.

Equity is what we used to call reverse racism. It attempts to nullifiy racist attitudes through more racist attitudes. That is why Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not about establishing equality for all races but perpetuating inequality — for all races. CRT divides the world into the privileged and the victims and this classification is entrely determined by race. Hence, white people will always be privileged and non-white people must always be victims. The only way to alleviate this artificial but unyielding rule of natural law is to punish the privileged and award the victims, thereby creating another iron rule of oligarchy.

The America that Sinatra sang, discussed and dreamed about was color blind. Color should not be a determining factor for anything. But America has become a nation as obsessed with race as Nazi Germany or the Antebellum South. The intellectually impaired President Joe Biden perpetuates racial sterotypes incessently by pretending there are white supremacists under every bed. Segregation has made a comeback across America because people have been told there is an unbridgeable gap between the races. Groups like Black Lives Matter have taken this persecution complex and longing for isolation to violent extremes.

It has become mandatory for governments and private corporations to establish diversity, equity and inclusiveness departments but these are cruel frauds that acutally work against diversity and inclusiveness by using the langauge of identity politics and dividing people from one another.

The town I live in,
The street, the house, the room.
The pavement of the city
Or a garden all in bloom.
The church, the school, the clubhouse
The millions lights I see!
But especially the people:
That's America to me.

The people are still there but they have become a frightened lot with cities destroyed by riots and drugs; gardens owned by billionaire hypocrites like Bill Gates; churches under attack and schools indoctrinating children into gender ideology and the LGBTQ agenda.

Would Frank recognize America today? Would he understand what has gone horribly wrong? I think he might just point the audience — that audience that he deftly supervised with only his incredible presence — to listen to the lyrics of The House I Live In and understand.