The Pledge of the Politically Correct (written during the first Gulf War)
Angry Americans clamor
For Constitutional Changes
To Protect the National Symbol
From Despicable Desecrators
While patriotic Auto Antennas
Proudly display their
Tattered Flag Rags
Flapping fiercely in the wind
©1990 T. McMullen All Rights Reserved
On a “friend’s” Facebook
page the following was posted in a graphic:
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
…My generation grew up reciting this every morning in school
with my hand over my heart. They no longer do that for fear of offending
someone.
Let’s see how many Americans will repost and not worry about
offending someone.”
[I
might add that the whole thing was in CAPS!]
The first comment,
from Jonathan, said, “"Under
God" was added in the '50s, during the apex of Cold War paranoia and
McCarthyism. The original pledge was non-secular. This same hysterical time in
our history is responsible for "In God We Trust" used as a slogan,
thrown around federal buildings and our currency.
We evolve and shed the bullshit.
People who bitch about PC attitudes do not operate in anyone's
best interest. They are haters, with entitlement issues about openly hating.
Recognize.
Jonathan, in a different
comment, later asserted, “The Bible
is a work of fiction.”
Then Brandon responded:
The Bible like all genuine works of world historical religion
are works of the human heart not "fiction". Why do rabid atheist's
eyeballs always seem like they are going to pop out? Hating religion,
especially Christianity, is an easy, weak target for intellectual weaklings.
This exchange prompted
the following from me:
Brandon, I am puzzled a bit
by the distinction that you seem to be making between works of “fiction” and
“works of the human heart.” Are you distinguishing between works of the heart
as opposed to works of the “head,” i.e., purely rational, devoid of affective
or emotional content? To be honest, I don’t think that I have ever encountered
such a thing. Even the most “rational” piece of scientific writing has emotive
qualities. It is the nature of written and spoken communication, and it seems
unlikely that you are arguing that fiction is exclusively rational, neither
inspired nor imbued with emotion; nor does it seem reasonable to assume that
you think the sacred works are devoid of all rational thought. If they were,
they would be worth very little indeed.
By works of the human heart,
do you mean something that is “true” as opposed to fiction, which is “false”? I
was faced innumerable times with eager students who, after reading some
powerful and moving piece of fiction, would ask, “Is it true?” The need for it
to be true in the historical sense gave them a sense of validation that a “made
up story” could not. This error can be attributed to the folly and ignorance of
youth. The most accurate answer is, of course, “though it may not have actually
happened, it is certainly true.” Sadly, this consumer society has created a
logical fallacy with their absurd and misleading phrase “based on a true story”
or “based on real events” to describe the most preposterous works of
supernatural or semi-historical fiction. This distortion of the concept of
truth can also be seen in the absurdly ironic misnomer of “reality” TV for the
ridiculously foolish and fabricated scenarios from Jerry Springer and Maury Povich to Big Brother and Fear Factor to Keeping
Up With the Kardashians and Here
Comes Honey Boo Boo.
To argue that the great
books of the world’s religions are “true,” in the sense of an accurate,
historical documentation of actual physical events that occurred in a real time
at a real place, and that they are “true” in their entirety, is also a patently
absurd approach. Those fundamentalists who insist that every word of their
“holy book” is not symbolic but literal either have no grasp of reality, or
they have never actually read the books that they purport to believe.
Perhaps you are getting at
the more meaningful distinction between pure literary fiction and mythological
works. In this case, it is the motive more than the method that separates the
two. Literary fiction is meant to entertain, to delight, to move, to motivate,
to challenge, and to explain to the reader. The author may create a setting
using verisimilitude or absolute fancy; they may create characters based on
archetypes or stereotypes, or they may attempt a complex and nuanced depiction
of actual people.
Notice, though, that each of
these intentions and techniques can be applied not merely to great works of
fiction, but they can also apply to The Upanishads, The Vedas, The
Mahabharata and its excerpt The
Bhagavad Gita, The Ramayana, The
Jainist Agamas, The Tao Te Ching (or
The Te Tao Ching), The Sutras, The Old Testament, The New Testament, The Koran, The Nordic Eddas, The Book of Mormon, and many other sacred texts. The difference between
these “sacred works” and ordinary works of fiction is that the sacred books
offer myths of cosmogony (creation), etiology (tracing of causes), legends and
parables, as well as codes of conduct and rules of propriety.
While acknowledging this
distinction between fiction and myth (and dismissing the more colloquial and
ethnocentric meaning of “myth” as a falsity, fabrication, or false religion),
I fail to comprehend the
source of your ire. You did not describe these works as messages from God but
as works of the human heart, thus denying them any supernatural standing or
sacrosanct authority.
If they are merely manmade,
then they are fiction in their storytelling, howsoever wise in their advice and
admonitions. As such, why can they not be held up to intellectual scrutiny,
just like Hamlet, Tristam Shandy, The Scarlett Letter, The Time Machine,
Brave New World, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, Death of a Salesman, The Tin Drum and other great works of fiction or Wealth of
Nations, Gulliver’s Travels, “The Declaration of Independence,” Leaves of
Grass, Origin of Species, Das
Kapital, “Self Reliance,” “Civil
Disobedience,” “The Pledge of Allegiance,” Mein Kampf and other works of poetry and persuasion?
You asked, “Why do rabid
atheist's eyeballs always seem like they are going to pop out? Hating religion,
especially Christianity, is an easy, weak target for intellectual
weaklings." If something is “an easy, weak target for intellectual
weaklings,” what must it be for those with some modicum of intellectual
prowess?
No, it is not the ease with
which individual inconsistencies, fallacies, fantasies, and absurdities in the
religious texts can be identified and ridiculed that causes thoughtful, even
spiritually-minded people to hold religion in such contempt. It is the use of
religion by its adherents and by those ignorant poseurs who are deluded into
believing themselves adherents, who use their understanding (or
misunderstanding, distortion, or perversion) of “their” religion to justify
their intrusion on the lives of others.
Persecution and subjugation
on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and lifestyle;
torture, murder and war from crusades to jihads, from occupations to intifadas,
from suicide bombers to drone missile strikes (and no, these are not all
morally equivalent—an uprising as a means of “shaking off” oppression, for
example, is more justified than an invasion or an occupation) but the evil
perpetrated from each of these acts of violence is done in the name and on
behalf of religion.
When it comes to the
original point, the document known as “The Pledge of Allegiance” or the “Flag
Salute,” it is a very interesting affirmation, designed in the late 1800’s to
bring a sense of patriotism at a time when the rise of capitalism had created
slums and wage-slave factories. Bellamy proposed a document that would be
recited by school children everywhere as a way of recognizing and encouraging
the political and economic aspirations of the people. It said, “I pledge
allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
The flag was seen as a
unifying symbol of the Republic, that is, the representative democracy, and not
the corrupt and unscrupulous oligarchy that it was becoming. The term
“indivisible” referred to the Civil War and the failure of the Confederacy to
dismantle the Union, but it also referred to the economic disparity being
created under laissez faire capitalism, the ever-widening gulf between the
haves and the have-nots, that was fomenting a disdain for and revolt from the jingoistic
“patriotism” of the masters by the working poor. The concluding phrase is,
obviously, the heart of the affirmation and the aspiration. It states that this
is a democracy with “liberty and justice for all,” with emphasis on “ALL.” When
read in this form, it clearly comports with Francis Bellamy’s socialist intent.
Bellamy was adamantly
opposed to the change fomented in 1924 by the American Legion and the Daughters
of the American Revolution. They replaced “my Flag” with “the Flag of the United States” and a year later, they
added, “of America.” Bellamy’s
protestations that these changes eroded the universality of his pledge went
unheeded.
The crowning distortion, the
change that, in fact, completely undermined the very premise of the pledge, was
the anti-communist insertion of “under God,” at the urging of the Knights of
Columbus during the Eisenhower administration. This absolutely upended an
egalitarian statement about a country that protected the liberty of ALL and
provided justice for All. The first statement in the first amendment of the
Bill of Rights (the document without which the Constitution could not have been
ratified and which is directly in line with the Preamble) is “Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof….” By changing the Flag Code and declaring this to be “one
Nation under God,” Eisenhower and
Congress had thoroughly, intentionally, and unconstitutionally undermined and
subverted the protection of religious liberty as proscribed in the first
amendment.
Put simply, whenever
politicians, pundits or partisans use God or religion as a rationale for
promoting or punishing behavior, liberty and justice are curtailed, and harm
transpires. Complaining about, even railing against those negative impacts,
even from something as initially laudable as the “Pledge of Allegiance” seems
completely justifiable.