June 28, 2002
Taking the Pledge
Taking the Pledge
by Bruce Jackson
You probably saw news footage of those PAC-sucking hypocrites in both houses of Congress saying the Pledge of Allegiance for the cameras the day after the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Pledge had two words too many. They were letting us know that whatever that hippie dope-smoking commie appellate court in California was up to, they were good Americans and you can count on them to stand up for the flag and everyone who ever died on the right side of any battle anywhere. There were a lot of sound-byte interviews, the point of which hardly varied: I love the flag, I love the Pledge which we've had since time immemorial, the Pledge is what separates us from the godless hordes.
To listen to all the rhetoric, you'd have thought the Ninth Circuit had outlawed the entire Pledge of Allegiance, that curious text composed by the American socialist and Baptist minister Francis Bellamy in 1882. All it did was say the two words added to it during the McCarthy Red Scare years were coercive and no kid should be forced to say them. If Congress wants to undo the two-word Red Scare emendation, the Ninth Circuit would be happy to send the pledge go back to school.
The members of Congress, with their usual ability to gloss over real differences in the presence of a television lens, ignored that. These are days in which America is being attacked by a small band of religious fanatics, so politicians in Washington stand ever ready to proclaim their patriotism. Common sense damned well better not get in the way.
Most of you dear readers are too young to remember what America was like in 1954, the year the Knights of Columbus pressured Congress into adding "under God" to the pledge, so maybe a little perspective would help. 1954 was a year in which:—black people were not allowed to vote in much of the American South.
—many major universities, Harvard among them, specifically prohibited women from holding tenured professorships.
—a person could be discharged from a job in which he or she had long served honorably and well merely because he or she had attended political meetings in the depths of the Depression twenty years earlier.
—the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation insisted there was no such thing as organized crime in America, that our only real danger was from people who didn't think the correct political thoughts.
—Princeton, Harvard and Yale had quotas for the numbers of Jews they would admit.
—none of the major clubs on Buffalo's Delaware Avenue admitted African-Americans, Jews, Italians or Poles.
—a poor person charged with a felony was not entitled to legal assistance, and simply being without cash in your pocket and proof of a job could get you jailed for "vagrancy."
—oral sex among husband and wife was a felony in most states, as was living together without the benefit of state and clergy.
—you could get decades in prison for "internal possession" if a blood test indicated the presence in your body of drugs for which you could not produce evidence of a doctor's prescription.
—prisoners who did not pick cotton or chop sugarcane quickly enough in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi were sometimes beaten to death as an example to the others.
For several days after the Ninth Circuit decision came down, spokesmen for "under God" went on talk shows saying that anyone who objected to the phrase was free to leave the classroom, that no one was forced to utter those two little words. What a bunch of hypocritical thugs they are. A 7-year-old kid is going to walk out of a second-grade classroom because he or she is a Native American, a Hindu, or a member of some other group that doesn't think religious pledges are a sine qua non of learning how to read and do arithmetic?
If it's that easy to step out of the herd, then how come not one of those politicians who flooded both chambers of Congress on June 27 was brave enough to say to one of the many cameras at the bottom of the Capitol steps, "This is really a lot of horseshit and we all know it, but we're doing it because this is an election year and none of us can afford to be called un-American in an election year?"
How come not one of them said, "Instead of fretting about words that got added during the Red scare and deleted during the Arab scare, maybe we should find a way to insert 'equality' into the Pledge of Allegiance, the one word that Francis Bellamy wanted in his original text but had to leave out because his boss disliked women and African-Americans?"
It's true: Bellamy wanted "liberty, justice and equality for all" as the pledge's last line, but his boss didn't like women and didn't like black people so Bellamy went for two out of three.
Far more members of Congress have gone on the air to tell us what's wrong with the two-word cut made by the Circuit Court in California than have gone on to tell us what's wrong with the cynicism, venality, corruption and outright crookery by top executives in Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, Global Crossing and WorldCom. There has still been no action in Congress whatsoever on any legislation to try to cope with those fiscal abominations. That's because just about every member of Congress has taken money from Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, Global Crossing and/or WorldCom, and hardly any of them get money from people interested in civil rights and the Constitution. At least not that much money.
Political correctness and sound bites are easy because they cost nothing and don't offend the corporate executives writing those fat checks.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could tell those millions of kids forced to mouth that pledge every morning that they'll see a day when both chambers of Congress enthusiastically pledge that henceforth they'll vote principle rather than bank account, civic need rather than corporate greed, responsibility and accountability rather than party politics and ideology? Forget it. Much better to man the barricades over two little words.
(Click here to download the Ninth Circuit decision in PDF format.)
Click here for a history of the Pledge of Allegiance.