Historians say the third verse, with its reference to “the hireling and the slave,” is meant to disparage the victims of enslavement, and Francis Scott Key himself owned slaves at the time he wrote the song in 1814. But this is all just trivia if no one is actually singing the verse anymore, and they aren’t. Nobody even sings the second verse (“On the shore, dimly seen, through the mists of the deep . . .”). The third verse is a dead letter. It’s like opposing the U.S. Constitution because it used to fail to guarantee voting rights for women, or indeed hating the United States because it used to accept slavery. Leftist activists have gone so wacky that they now sound like Hal Philip Walker, the nutty populist presidential candidate Robert Altman lampooned in his classic 1975 political movie “Nashville.” Walker, an unseen presence broadcasting out of a van, catches on with the dummies on a platform of opposing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on grounds that it is too elitist (“Consider our National Anthem. Nobody knows the words. Nobody can sing it. Nobody understands it. I suppose all the lawyers supported it . . . Change our National Anthem to something people understand.”) United by a presumption that all of the institutions are rotten, some strange coalitions of left and right emerge.