The Supreme Court's ruling today that the ludicrous, deceitful, and divisive words "under god" should remain in the "pledge of allegiance" reminded me of the linguistic concept of the speech act - speaking words that, by being spoken, do what they say: by saying "I pledge," one is in fact pledging.
The ruling is, of course, ridiculous, and can only, eventually, be either removed as a matter of law, or retained as an enforcement of political power in direct opposition to the clear word of Constitutional law.
But wait, the Court does have another option: to declare the whole pledge a sham, and make the saying of it punishable as a misdemeanor, perhaps as some minor form of fraud.
The pledge began in 1892 as a sanctimonious gesture of self-righteousness by a Boston youth magazine, "The Youth's Companion." Then 22 words long, it was designed as a recitation for school children to use during activities the next month marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America.
Immediately, one sees the problems cropping up. First, there's the obvious shortcoming: that it was designed to commemorate something that never happened.
Its history generated other failings. In a paroxysm of patriotism, the fatuous words quickly were used to infect most of American grade-school education, and then during World War II, when adult Americans wallowed in their childhood indoctrination with the words (rather than face up to their complete indifference to what the Nazis had long been doing in Europe), Congress made the pledge an official government "United States Flag Code." Eisenhower added the "under god" business in 1954, to shore it up against its most obvious shortcoming: Again, that it is based on lies.
These are so obvious as to be completely ignorable by all those who have been required or left little alternative but to chant them over and over to the point of forgetting to ask what it is that is being chanting. The deafness to their substance and duplicity is apparently aided by the same juvenile wishfulness that made them seem heroic words when the indoctrination began. (Of course, the earlier the better, as in any indoctrination with palpably false ideals.)
When Eisenhower justified the long-contentious words, "under god," by saying they reaffirmed "the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future" and permitted Americans to "constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war," he was being no less rhetorical and puffed-up than the self-satisfyingly righteous scribes at the Boston boys' magazine. The notion that there was "Liberty and Justice for all" in the USA in 1954, any more than in 1892, is so absurd that only indoctrinating repetition could render it convincing – and then, in any case, only to the people who enjoy (if only, slaveringly, by proxy) the benefits of the wholesale and pervasive injustice and inequality.
The Supreme Court ducked the issue today, in a cowardly act that in reality only forestalls the political opportunism and cynicism that the majority will certainly exhibit at the next opportunity. But, am I missing something, or shouldn't the issue be: How has this pack of lying words, that has allowed millions upon millions of Americans to perform umpteen thousand acts of blatant hypocrisy, each, so categorically withstood and even avoided howls of derision from skeptical Americans, who do not need the cynical words "under god" (blasphemous, if there were a god to blaspheme) to provoke them?
The ruling is, of course, ridiculous, and can only, eventually, be either removed as a matter of law, or retained as an enforcement of political power in direct opposition to the clear word of Constitutional law.
But wait, the Court does have another option: to declare the whole pledge a sham, and make the saying of it punishable as a misdemeanor, perhaps as some minor form of fraud.
The pledge began in 1892 as a sanctimonious gesture of self-righteousness by a Boston youth magazine, "The Youth's Companion." Then 22 words long, it was designed as a recitation for school children to use during activities the next month marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America.
Immediately, one sees the problems cropping up. First, there's the obvious shortcoming: that it was designed to commemorate something that never happened.
Its history generated other failings. In a paroxysm of patriotism, the fatuous words quickly were used to infect most of American grade-school education, and then during World War II, when adult Americans wallowed in their childhood indoctrination with the words (rather than face up to their complete indifference to what the Nazis had long been doing in Europe), Congress made the pledge an official government "United States Flag Code." Eisenhower added the "under god" business in 1954, to shore it up against its most obvious shortcoming: Again, that it is based on lies.
These are so obvious as to be completely ignorable by all those who have been required or left little alternative but to chant them over and over to the point of forgetting to ask what it is that is being chanting. The deafness to their substance and duplicity is apparently aided by the same juvenile wishfulness that made them seem heroic words when the indoctrination began. (Of course, the earlier the better, as in any indoctrination with palpably false ideals.)
When Eisenhower justified the long-contentious words, "under god," by saying they reaffirmed "the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future" and permitted Americans to "constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war," he was being no less rhetorical and puffed-up than the self-satisfyingly righteous scribes at the Boston boys' magazine. The notion that there was "Liberty and Justice for all" in the USA in 1954, any more than in 1892, is so absurd that only indoctrinating repetition could render it convincing – and then, in any case, only to the people who enjoy (if only, slaveringly, by proxy) the benefits of the wholesale and pervasive injustice and inequality.
The Supreme Court ducked the issue today, in a cowardly act that in reality only forestalls the political opportunism and cynicism that the majority will certainly exhibit at the next opportunity. But, am I missing something, or shouldn't the issue be: How has this pack of lying words, that has allowed millions upon millions of Americans to perform umpteen thousand acts of blatant hypocrisy, each, so categorically withstood and even avoided howls of derision from skeptical Americans, who do not need the cynical words "under god" (blasphemous, if there were a god to blaspheme) to provoke them?
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