Drinking Song

In Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker’s video, the style of which is reminiscent of a television advertisement, the U.S. national anthem is played on Panamanian beer bottles and cans. The brand names of the four beers featured—Atlas, Panama, Soberana (“Sovereign”), and Balboa (from Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish conquistador)—conjure images of Panama’s geography, history, and nationhood. While the video has a humorous aspect—the anthem ends with a toppling beer pyramid and a sonorous belch—the symbolic clash it stages between the United States and Panama offers a sharp critique of the former’s imperialist interventions into the latter through the construction and administration of the Panama Canal, which it controlled from 1914 until 1999.